The Museum of Mankind: Man and Boy in the British Museum Ethnography Department 9781789203035

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THE MUSEUM OF MANKIND

THE MUSEUM OF MANKIND Man and Boy in the British Museum Ethnography Department

Ben Burt

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Ben Burt All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2019010450

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-302-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-303-5 ebook

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

vi viii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1 From British Museum to Museum of Mankind

5

Chapter 2 Colleagues and Friends

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Chapter 3 Exhibitions

44

Chapter 4 The Stores

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Chapter 5 Research and Collecting

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Chapter 6 Education

100

Chapter 7 Back to the British Museum

121

Epilogue

141

Appendix Ethnography Department Exhibitions, 1970 to 2003

143

References

153

Index

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 ‘Ethno’ staff at Adrian Digby’s retirement party in 1969

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1.2 A view of the Museum of Mankind in 1997

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1.3 Part of the Oceania section of the British Museum Ethnography Galleries in 1963

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1.4 A reconstructed altar in the Divine Kingship exhibition of 1970 to 1973

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1.5 Part of the Oceania store in the KEB in 1960

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2.1 The Control Room with Security Warders in 1997

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2.2 Mick Goddard at a display of his junk sculptures in 1987

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2.3 Andy McLeod and Paul Guzie in the Carpenters’ Shop in 1993

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2.4 The Students’ Room at Burlington in 1997

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2.5 The inner sanctum of the Tea Room in 1981

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3.1 A security photo of a glass case display showing the grid system

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3.2 The courtyard of the Yoruba Religious Cults exhibition of 1974 to 1981

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3.3 A view of the Sana’a market in the Nomad and City exhibition of 1976 to 1978

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3.4 The palace courtyard built for the Asante: Kingdom of Gold exhibition of 1981 to 1984

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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3.5 The weaver’s house with its loom in the Vasna exhibition of 1982 to 1984

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3.6 Figures in The Hidden Peoples of the Amazon exhibition of 1985 to 1987

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3.7 The Toraja carvers with their finished granary in 1987 64 4.1 A view of the Africa floor in the early 1980s with typical storage

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4.2 A Mike Cobb cartoon from 1993, showing Mick Goddard and Andy McLeod

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4.3 Albert Davis at his retirement party in 1985

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4.4 Museum Assistants emptying sterilised artefacts from the fumigator in 1985

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5.1 Peter Gibbs and a colleague in a performance at a 1970s Christmas party

86

5.2 Our team working to document Kwara’ae culture in 1991

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5.3 Harry Persaud at his desk in the Library Closed Stacks in 1997

99

6.1 David Serkoak, the Inuk teacher for the Living Artic exhibition of 1987 to 1990

106

6.2 Sonia Nimr welcoming a school group in the Palestinian Costume exhibition of 1989 to 1991

109

6.3 The Day of the Dead Activity Room in 1992, with one of the Linares brothers

114

6.4 Kojo Darko with school students in the Benin Village programme in 1997

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7.1 The Benin section of the Sainsbury African Galleries, opened in 2001

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7.2 Celebrating Africa in 2003 in the British Museum Great Court

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book owes everything to the friends and colleagues I

worked with over the years in the British Museum Ethnography Department, only a few of whom are mentioned by name. Not all will agree with everything I have written, but a number of them contributed valuable information and advice, which is appreciated even when it was not taken. Colleagues who helped fill gaps in my own recollections through conversation or presentations at the Museum of Mankind seminar in 2016 include Helen Wolfe, John Osborn, John Picton, Julie Hudson, Malcolm McLeod, Marjorie Caygill, Mike Cobb, Nigel Barley, Paul Guzie, Shelagh Weir, Stephen Hooper and Tony Shelton. Those who also read and commented on the drafts include Dorota Starzecka, Jim Hamill, Jill Hasell, Mick Goddard and Michael O’Hanlon. Penny Bateman and Lissant Bolton, both of whom did well at the sometimes difficult job of being my manager, were my most critical and helpful readers. Others outside the Department who read and commented on the drafts include Annette Ward, Fiona Candlin, Jane HuxleyKhng and Nick Stanley. Thanks to you all.

This book is for Burfi and Adam, who enjoyed the Museum of Mankind and its activities when they were too small to understand everything else that was going on there.

INTRODUCTION When I began working in museums more than fifty years ago,

I didn’t think about their role in Western culture or their social purpose, and I don’t think most of my elders and betters did either. During my years at the Museum of Mankind I found opportunities and responsibilities to shift public understandings of cultures around the world that the British still viewed from a colonial perspective and museums treated as ‘ethnographic’. Some of my colleagues had similar ambitions, but we were not informed by any debate on museum history, theory or practice. In the meantime, ‘museum studies’ was developing into a discipline in its own right, providing a retrospective academic background for our personal experiences in an ever increasing literature. This memoir’s contribution is the history and ethnography of an important museum experiment, capturing institutional and personal memories and airing opinions. It does not engage in the complex theories that can make museum studies such hard work, but it offers material for others to theorise, as well as some relief from the theory. That said, it may be useful to begin with an overview of developments in museum ethnography during the lifetime of the Museum of Mankind. The Museum of Mankind was founded as an offshoot of the very conservative British Museum, inheriting a culture of collecting, preserving, classifying and documenting artefacts as ‘specimens’ as an end in itself. With this came an ethos of public service in making collections and curatorial knowledge available through exhibitions and consultation. In time there was a shift towards self-critical reflection on museum practice, revealed by certain curators in their exhibitions and publications, and a developing sense of responsibility to explain the societies that the Museum represented. But there was little dis-

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cussion about the role of museums in cultural reproduction, whether in maintaining or challenging the prevailing values of our own society or in supporting the source communities of our collections in such endeavours. The Museum of Mankind’s most notable achievement was its very active exhibition programme, particularly the reconstructions that presented artefacts as introductions to places and peoples rather than simply as collections of objects. Some of the education programmes that accompanied particular exhibitions took this further to actively engage visitors with the cultures concerned. This was what the Museum of Mankind was remembered for by its visitors, but it depended as much on the initiatives of individual curators and educators as on any concerted policy. The stored collections were accessible to researchers as a longstanding public obligation, as was the Library, but under bureaucratic procedure rather than active outreach, so their cultural potential was seldom realised. Despite its hierarchical administration, the Museum seemed to proceed under a vague general consensus, masking various disagreements and contradictions, rather than by a shared set of principles and policies. The result was a mixture of great achievements, routine mediocrity and a few embarrassing mistakes, under ambivalent leadership. The most persistent contradiction in curatorial policy, in the Museum of Mankind and elsewhere, was between employing collections as ‘ethnography’, to interpret exotic culture and possibly reflect on Western values, and as ‘art’, for the appreciation of exotic forms in terms of Western aesthetics with its associated values of authenticity and markets. These tendencies, widely debated in museums from the 1980s, sometimes complemented each other in the Museum of Mankind’s exhibitions and both inherited the colonial taint of primitivism and a denial of history. Ethnographic projects challenged these problems more effectively than art ones, but over the history of the Museum of Mankind, art eventually gained ascendancy as intellectually and practically expedient within the increasingly dominant culture of the Western art world, encouraged by commercial sponsorship as it replaced public funding. The art–ethnography debate ran parallel with another major issue that developed during the lifetime of the Museum of

INTRODUCTION

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Mankind: how to respond to claims on the collections by the communities they originated from. The questionable means by which many ethnographic collections were acquired and the way in which they were curated were first drawn to public attention in the settler colonies of North America and Australasia by indigenous minorities who had gained enough experience of the majority societies to make their voices heard. It took longer for these groups to gain the attention of the distant museums of Europe, but in the meantime former colonies in Africa and their diaspora communities were also questioning the ownership of colonial collections, and advocates for more remote indigenous minorities were seeking to engage museums in cultural issues. As the cost of global travel decreased and communications improved with digital technology, these political pressures increased and ethnography curators responded, sometimes defensively but often positively and creatively. The Museum of Mankind welcomed indigenous researchers, craft demonstrators and educators and worked increasingly on collaborative projects with members of source communities, even as it warded off claims for the repatriation of collections, according to British Museum policy. It tried to address indigenous concerns for both cultural heritage and participation in the art world even as it neglected questions of Western cultural hegemony. These issues represent one way of looking at the history of the Museum of Mankind. Another is the story of the scores of men and women who worked there, many of them quite unconcerned with curatorial policy. Most were focused on the practicalities of preserving the collections, departmental administration, building exhibitions and caring for the public that came to see them, all of which allowed the senior curators to make museum history. Again, they seem to have developed their methods and practices as much by personal initiative as by management policy, often creating their own jobs and working with limited resources. They also showed how an interest in museum work and a sense of useful public service could compensate for poor wages and limited career opportunities. As a memoir, this book gives them credit for their essential contributions through the personal relationships that sustained them in their work and made the Museum of Mankind

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the achievement that it was. Maybe their personalities and experiences also hold lessons for more academic museum studies, which seldom touch on the influence of junior curators, technical and service staff in shaping the institutional culture and ethos of museums. Most of these people have since moved on, retired or died, leaving me as the oldest and longest-serving member of what was the Ethnography Department and is now the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas of the British Museum. But my memory is personal and partial. Some colleagues have shared their recollections with me but others have not, so there is plenty of scope for further studies to complement or correct this memoir of the Museum of Mankind.

O NE

FROM BRITISH MUSEUM TO MUSEUM OF MANKIND The monumental facade of the British Museum was an awe-

inspiring sight when I walked through the gates on the morning of New Year’s Day in 1968. I was nineteen and going to start work as an assistant conservation officer in the Department of Ethnography. Coming from a farm on the other side of Bristol as a country boy, my new colleagues soon began to tease me as a ‘hayseed’, parodying my Somerset accent with expressions such as ‘Cor, buggerrr me!’ I had my own stereotype of them as Cockneys and I enjoyed their quick wit and urban sophistication. I soon learned that for all the grandeur of the British Museum, ‘Ethno’ was a homely and amusing place to work, as well as a source of fascinating knowledge to feed my imagination about faraway people and places. It did not occur to me that I might still be working for the British Museum fifty years later, and writing about it. At the time I wasn’t too concerned with what ethnography meant, and nor were my colleagues. Curious acquaintances might make guesses like ‘Is it something to do with insects?’, but we accepted it as technical jargon that went with the job. I was excited to be working on artefacts from Africa, Oceania, the Americas and Asia and it was some years before I had to explain ethnography to visitors, after the Ethnography Department had become the Museum of Mankind and I was its Education Officer. Then I would say that it really meant the description of culture and, since this evidently applied to the whole of the British Museum, go on to explain that it usually covered the cultures studied by anthropology (which was hardly less ambiguous). Over the years one or two senior curators in the Department attempted to redefine ethnography as a

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distinctive academic methodology, and I tried to confront the unpleasant historical truth that in museums it really meant no more or less than the colonial world’s savages and barbarians or, as they were more politely called, ‘primitive cultures’. Ethnography in the British Museum began among the ‘artificial curiosities’ of its founding collections in the mid-eighteenth century, which included items like blowgun darts from Borneo; ‘w.ch being try’d had no effect on a wounded pigeon’, and ‘A piece of flowered weaved stuffe made of grasse leaves from Angola worth there one shilling’. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Museum’s artefacts were separated from the Library and the Natural History collections, paintings were sent to the National Gallery, the Museum was rebuilt and then the artefacts were divided into Departments of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Coins and Medals, and Oriental Antiquities. Oriental included all those cultures not regarded as part of the Classical heritage of Europe, including British and Medieval, Egyptian and Assyrian, as well as Ethnography, which emerged as a kind of dustbin category for everything else. However, as the British Museum’s Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections explained in the early twentieth century: ‘the great ancient civilizations . . . even that of Greece, arose gradually from primitive stages of culture; the instruments and utensils of savage and barbarous peoples are therefore not without interest to the study of antiquities’ (British Museum 1910: 1). That more or less summed up what ethnography meant to the British Museum at that time. Those who still confuse the British Museum with the Natural History Museum may like to note that the natural history collections moved to the new ‘British Museum (Natural History)’ in the 1880s. This made more room for a growing number of new acquisitions, including massive quantities of ‘ethnography’. As the British Museum continued to reorganise, the Ethnographical Collections were shifted between several new departments – British and Medieval, then Oriental, then Ceramics and Ethnography – as if the Museum didn’t quite know where they belonged – until they were given a department of their own in 1946. What ethnography meant during the latter twentieth century is shown by the things that department did not include. It covered Africa (except ancient Egypt, the ancient Greek and

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Roman and urban Islamic societies of north Africa, and later European and Asian immigrants); the Americas (all native peoples and ancient civilisations but not European or African immigrants); the Pacific Islands and Australia (again, indigenous peoples only); and contemporary peasant societies of Asia and eastern Europe (but not the ancient or elite cultures of the major civilisations to which most of them belonged). When I began in 1968, no one seemed to question this institutional structure or the academic world view it represented, and I had already assimilated it from a year of voluntary work for Bristol City Museum, which had qualified me for the job at the British Museum. I had been interested in ancient history and archaeology since I was small and, after demonstrating my inaptitude for engineering during six months as a stores assistant for a tractor company, my father agreed to pay for my keep while I tried something different. An archaeology curator (and future Director of the Museum of London), Max Hebditch, happened to live in our village of Clapton-in-Gordano and he gave me a lift in and out of Bristol each day. After a couple of weeks stuffing envelopes for the Secretary of the Prehistoric Society, Egyptologist Leslie Grinsell, I began to get my hands on the collections. I helped pack the Oriental collections, which they were selling off, then redisplayed the whole Ethnography gallery, which no one else had the time or interest for. It wasn’t beyond even a beginner to improve on the jumbled displays I had gazed at in wonder as a child. There was the grimacing cutout face added to a Plains Indian shirt and leggings, spread flat on the wall as if waving a tomahawk, under the heading ‘The American Indian at War’, and the chain of Australian boomerangs, strung from each other on wires through holes drilled in the edges. I went through the drawers underneath the tall window cabinets to discover many more marvellous objects and mounted whatever I could fit into the new display on hessian-covered backboards. Much of the remainder I was able to re-store in new wooden cabinets in the basement, with plenty of mothballs to prevent further holes in things like Waiwai feather headdresses from Guiana and red-tufted Naga ornaments from Assam. That was how I discovered ‘ethnography’, as the works of faraway exotic peoples whose recent existence made them so

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much more fascinating than the threadbare past of archaeology which had interested me till then. Not only were the artefacts complete rather than just imperishable buried fragments, but there were photos and books describing the people who had made them, resonating with the colonial folklore of my upbringing. I had been an Indian in games of cowboys and Indians, with chicken feather headdress and a tipi with bamboo poles which later served for homemade bows and arrows and even an African spear. My father had all Rider Haggard’s novels of adventures in Darkest Africa and was an admirer of the adventure novelist Jack London. When I read London’s books based on a voyage to the Pacific I was fascinated by his portrayal of savage Solomon Islanders and incredulous that people could be as brutal and degraded as he described them. Just as I had questioned my Church of England primary school teaching that heathens were condemned to Hell before they had even the opportunity to choose Christian redemption, so I could not accept that ‘natives’ were ordained to be so savage and subhuman. I think my parents’ ideals of social justice led me to idealise the natural order of the world as essentially moral and they certainly encouraged me to question the Christian dogma of that school. I knew that when we were separated into the sheep and the goats on the Day of Judgement, I would be one of the goats, as a non-believer. My childhood cry of ‘But it’s not fair!’ continued to resonate long after my belief in God was destroyed by reflecting on the amorality of the natural world. Eventually I was able to refute the savage stereotype as an anthropologist who got to know these Solomon Islanders personally, but in the meantime I found beautiful Solomon Islands artefacts and read Smithsonian Institution studies of Native Americans as I burrowed through the Bristol collections. Then I went on to work in the conservation workshop in the basement. I learned to repair and restore shattered Medieval and Roman pots (and a Roman-period skull which I accidentally dropped from a six-foot shelf ), to clean corroded bronze and make resin casts of coins and stone tools, some good enough to be confused with the originals. I took the chance to clean a New Guinea over-modelled and painted skull and an Austral Islands Polynesian feather headdress. It was all this, with photos to prove it, that convinced the British Museum to

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employ me. But at the same time I got involved in the fun and games between the two archaeology conservators and the two taxidermists in the workshop next door, all young men. What started with water-pistol fights between the two factions soon escalated to squeezy detergent bottles. The graphic designer, who used a darkroom in the archaeology workshop for his silkscreen printing, joined in, and then they all raided the carpenters as they were fitting out a gallery upstairs. The climax came when we chained one carpenter’s bicycle to a full dustbin outside our workshops and when he inadvertently pulled the bin over, I lured his wary colleagues down the corridor to laugh at him, got on the other side of them, and we soaked them all with our squeezy bottles. Their most spectacular prank was making gunpowder from sulphur, saltpetre and iron filings, purchased on the petty cash from Boots the chemist. They never managed an explosion, but eventually an inch of the mixture in an aluminium saucepan produced a roaring column of flame which left nothing behind but the iron handle. I’m surprised no one got the sack, but Max Hebditch never even asked on our way home in his car why my hair and shirt were soaked. So when I came to the British Museum, I was already familiar with the idea of primitive peoples, and with the secrets that the junior technical staff kept from their academic curatorial bosses, but I also became conscious of how the Museum reflected British class culture. I was prepared for this too, having been brought up between families who were bourgeois and petty aristocracy on my mother’s side and working class on my father’s. My companions at primary school were the sons of manual labourers who called my father ‘Mr Burt’ when he employed them for the haymaking, and my best friend’s father was the postman. My mother’s family had big houses and awfully posh accents and all stood up when someone entered the drawing room saying ‘No, don’t get up!’ By occupation as assistant conservation officer, as well as by inclination, I was firmly in the working-class camp at the British Museum, and it was even more fun than Bristol, if less risky. This was before there were any professional qualifications for organics conservation, which was what we were mostly doing. Again, the workshop (not yet a laboratory) was in the basement of the East Residence wing of the museum, named because it

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originally housed museum staff, in a cluster of rooms down a long passage. I had a bench in the main room, with Conservation Officers John Lee at the other end and Tom Govier in a small room of his own next door. The senior conservation officers in a room beyond that were older men who had been at the British Museum since before the War. Les Langton would go on about what we youngsters would not have got away with if we had been under him in the Navy, while Harold Gowers was mild and avuncular and more independent minded. They didn’t really like each other. Then there were the museum assistants who did the fetching carrying and storing of artefacts in the warren of vaulted tunnels and pokey rooms under the ground floor galleries, and the carpenter and handyman who made fixtures and fittings. They all took their tea breaks with us in the main conservation workshop on accustomed chairs and stools, and more often than not the banter focused on Senior Museum Assistant Albert Davis. Albert must have been about fifty, lanky in a dark suit with a gaunt face and toothy quizzical smile. He would sit on a stool in the middle of the room, teasing all of us until, at a signal, everyone would screw up their paper sandwich bags and bombard him with them. The joke was that he was Jewish, but only because his wife worked for a Jewish dry cleaners, and he played to the stereotype, pretending to be tight-fisted. He also smoked like a chimney and his car was said to be an ashtray on wheels. Of various more or less tasteless Jewish jokes played on him, the best was when they made him a seven-branch cigarette holder, of silver-plated copper tubing. We also had fun with Albert’s tea things. He kept his cup and saucer in a cupboard in Tom’s small room and left his lunchtime cheese roll there every day. I had the idea of putting a square of thick polythene under the slice of cheese, so when he bit into it his teeth wouldn’t go through. He enjoyed that joke and every day afterwards he would make a show of lifting the cheese to check underneath it before eating. So I cut a slice of tough yellow beeswax and substituted it for the cheese, he went through the usual pantomime, took a bite and couldn’t get his teeth through the wax, just leaving a row of tooth marks. He enjoyed that too, so we tried something else. With the help of our boss Harold Gowers, we tried to drill a hole in the bot-

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tom of Albert’s teacup, but unfortunately it split in two, so I repaired it with water-soluble glue. When Albert had his tea, it should have fallen in half but instead it stayed together above the tea-line and just opened up at the bottom, filling the saucer with tea – less dramatic but still amusing. Mick Goddard, Museum Assistant for Africa and about thirty years old, was the most ingenious of the practical jokers, and later the creator of many practical inventions for the Department. He was very good at creeping up behind you when you were concentrating on repairs to an African or Polynesian artefact and dropping a large iron bin or slapping a plank on the floor with his foot. I never managed to catch him out in the same way. Perhaps his best stunt was a booby trap which he set up after work to catch Tom in his room the next morning. Unfortunately, it caught one of the security warders on his night-time patrol instead. As the poor man opened Tom’s door, a huge block of expanded polystyrene fell on his head, the bin fell with a clang on the floor, and his torch lit up the naked figure of a shop window dummy standing in the middle of the room. I doubt if the senior staff of the Department, in their offices on the second floor of the east wing galleries, had any idea of what was going on in the basement. The Keeper, Adrian Digby, was a Central America archaeologist, a kindly old bloke but very formal. Every few weeks he would come down to our workshop, jingling his keys in front of him with both hands and looking over his half-moon glasses as he asked questions on the lines of ‘How’s it going Burt? Finding the job interesting?’ He was ‘Mr Digby’ to me, and ‘Sir’ to Les Langton, who was a typical NCO. More than twenty years later, when Digby returned for exhibition openings where hardly anyone remembered him and I kept him company, he told me the story of how, when the collections and staff were evacuated during the War, ‘Langton’ asked if he had seen ‘his other wife’s shoe’, meaning his wife’s other shoe. He found this amusing enough to tell me more than once. The other senior curators were rather less formal and called me Ben, but to me they were still ‘Mr (Bryan) Cranstone’, Assistant Keeper for Oceania, ‘Miss (Elizabeth) Carmichael’, Assistant Keeper for the Americas, ‘Miss (Shelagh) Weir’, Assistant Keeper for Asia and Europe, and

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Figure 1.1. ‘Ethno’ staff at Adrian Digby’s retirement party in 1969: left to right, Ben Burt, Assistant Conservation Officer; Tom Govier and John Lee, Conservation Officers; Dave Osborn, handyman; Bill Fagg, Deputy Keeper; Mick Goddard, Museum Assistant; Sid Hunter, Carpenter; and Harry Cousins, Museum Assistant. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

‘Mr (William) Fagg’, Deputy Keeper. Bill Fagg, a distinguished African art historian, was the most difficult to get to know, partly because he spoke so slowly that you wanted to finish his sentences for him, but also probably because he was shy. I later heard that there were tensions between Digby and Fagg, but this was not apparent to the junior staff. The gap between the basement and the upstairs offices was an apt symbol for the class structure of the British Museum in those days. The only time I remember the keepers noticing any untoward behaviour was when the handyman, Dave Osborne, was taking pot-shots with an airgun from the basement at pigeons on the roof, and accidentally shot a hole in Mr Digby’s office window on the second floor. I heard that Digby ran out shouting ‘Someone’s trying to kill me!’ Dave was only saved from the sack because his father was head of the carpenters’ shop and interceded with Maisie Webb, the Deputy Director, who he used to do private jobs for.

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The British Museum employed mostly men in all kinds of trades and none, and the junior curatorial staff came from similar backgrounds, finding themselves there more or less by accident with no prior interest in museums or their contents. These were working-class jobs where people might remain for life, if they chose, as many did. Parents might be followed into the British Museum by their children, like Dave and his father, or ‘Ron the Painter’ Gazzaniga, who had a son in the locksmiths and a daughter in the bookbinders. But those with the aptitude might move from trades or unskilled work into more interesting jobs with the museum collections. Albert Davis had started as a labourer in the ‘heavy gang’ of masons’ assistants who moved large objects and loads around, before coming to Ethnography as a museum assistant and ending up in charge of the Department’s Stores. Mick Goddard began by fetching books in the Library in 1962, following about twenty unskilled jobs and a spell as an army conscript in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion, after leaving school with no qualifications and very dubious spelling. He retired in 1995 as a senior museum assistant doing an artistic technical job which he more or less invented for himself during thirty-five years’ service. In Conservation, Harold Gowers and Les Langton were craftsmen, John Lee had been a British Museum photographer, and Tom Govier a British Museum locksmith. In those days, everyone was learning on the job and, while some never learned very much, others had the opportunity to develop new skills and interests. However, without university degrees they could not hope to move into the academic grades in the British Museum. Denis Alsford, who first joined his uncle in the locksmiths, became a museum assistant in Ethnography and a self-taught expert on Amazonian Indians, but he had to go to Canada to get academic recognition, soon becoming Curator of Collections in the National Museum of Man. Tom Govier later joined him there, to become Head of Conservation. Not all were as well suited to their jobs, including the clumsy museum assistant who accidentally kicked the ear off a famous ancient Mexican onyx jaguar. Others just worked steadily and conscientiously without academic ambition until they became indispensable experts on where and how the collections were stored. John Osborn joined the British Museum

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as a photocopier straight from school in 1964, became a museum assistant in Ethnography in 1966 and eventually retired as Albert’s successor in charge of the Stores in 2009. Then there was Ted the Messenger, a bent and wizened old ex-soldier in a khaki overall who had his own chair and cupboard in the passage where he made his tea and boiled his eggs for lunch in the same kettle and grumbled at everyone. He was one of those people who made life miserable for himself by trying to make it miserable for everyone else. Once, when Mick had dressed a dummy in a white lab coat and wire-wool hair to stand with its back turned at Harold Gowers’ workbench, Ted walked in and began speaking to it, to everyone’s amusement but his own. Nor was Ted amused when someone who saw him and Albert pushing a barrow of artefacts through a gallery was reminded of a popular TV comedy series about rag and bone men and called out ‘Steptoe and Son!’ While the academic staff of the Department had to deal with the scholarly legacy of primitivism to curate the artefacts of the ‘savage and barbarous peoples’, their juniors had the casual racism of British popular culture to enliven tea break conversations in the conservation workshop. Geoff was a carpenter in his thirties who rode a BMW motorbike with a sidecar and was often told he was using a racehorse to pull a milk float. He would sit in his accustomed chair in the workshop, round face, slicked back hair, khaki overalls and legs spread while he ate his sandwiches. His common complaint was that he needed his ‘fucking passport’ to drive through Brixton on his way to work because it was full of ‘fucking blacks’. Not that blacks were singled out as ‘fucking’, as Geoff included the word in every sentence he spoke, once he realised that he could stop substituting ‘bleeding’ in front of me as the new boy. As the only Black person in the Department was a Caribbean messenger called Greg who kept himself to himself in the offices upstairs (I wonder why?), Geoff caused less offence than Les Langton when he teased Kassim, a young Malay trainee curator, for having ‘only just come down from the trees’. Although Les had worked in Nigeria to help Bill Fagg’s brother set up the Jos Museum, he had not learned much respect for non-Europeans. Kassim, however, defended himself with suave good humour and had the last laugh when he surprised everyone on return-

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ing to Kuala Lumpur by taking with him the Keeper’s attractive secretary Margaret. They married and many years later I met him again as a senior curator in the Malaysia National Museum. In those days such overt racism was not the scandal it later became, but I did manage to enliven the tea breaks by challenging the attitudes of Geoff and Les, with the support of those colleagues who recognised bigotry and enjoyed a good argument. Although I enjoyed the conservation work and the company, I wanted to learn more about the different cultures we were dealing with. In the Department Library I found shelves of early twentieth-century Smithsonian and American Museum of Natural History journals documenting American Indian culture from recollections of pre-reservation days. I read them in otherwise dull evenings in my Civil Service hostel, where the social highlights were drunken Friday night pub crawls with Geordie civil servants, who also taught me to smoke. In those days bitter was two and six a pint, that is eight pints for a quid, but my pay was thirteen pounds a week. When we worked through the whole of the Oceania galleries cleaning and restoring some of the world’s most esteemed collections, I began reading similar Bishop Museum journals on Polynesia. This gave extra interest to the conservation craft work, which was barely informed by either scientific techniques or academic guidance. Anyone wanting to research the origins of domestic fowls in Polynesia by genetic analysis of feathers from our Marquesas Islands headdresses would be well advised to check carefully the conservation records to see where I had replaced moth eaten quills with glossy plumes from the cleaner’s feather duster. On the other hand, the pig tusks which I found in a box of bits and pieces and stuck into holes in the two faces on a Vanuatu mask with a human figure on top may well have been the original ones, as shown on the registration drawing when it came to the British Museum in 1914. I also began to make things for myself. I knew I would never be able to own the kind of artefacts I was working on, so during lunch breaks and Saturday mornings I carved a Solomon Islands canoe figurehead and a Northwest Coast Native American horn spoon and headdress mask, which fooled curators and later some Native American carvers.

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Before too long I applied to study anthropology at university and despite poor A Levels and no maths (having failed the mock O Level), I was accepted by University College London, just a block north of the British Museum. Thanks to a reference from Bryan Cranstone, who taught on the course, I was given an interview which enabled me to show that I had learned something from being at the British Museum and in 1969 I became a ‘mature student’ (a relative term) at the age of twentythree. I got my BSc, then worked on a Master’s degree, and during those five years I managed to avoid the turmoil through which the British Museum Department of Ethnography was transformed into the Museum of Mankind. When I re-joined my friends and colleagues there in 1974, I had a different job in a different institution, although perhaps things were not quite so different as they appeared. The Museum of Mankind occupied a rather grand nineteenthcentury building sited incongruously in a small backstreet in Mayfair, devoid of greenery but named Burlington Gardens,

Figure 1.2. A view of the Museum of Mankind in 1997, looking along Burlington Gardens from Saville Row towards Bond Street. This and other photos dated 1997 were made when the Ethnography Department was preparing to return to the British Museum. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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which had been built to house London University. Bill Fagg was now Keeper of Ethnography, Adrian Digby having retired while the Ethnography Department was still at the British Museum in 1969. The facade was lined with statues of famous intellectuals such as Plato and Aristotle, Newton and Adam Smith, and Fagg wrote that the Department found itself in this distinguished company ‘by a kind of serendipity’ since they were all relevant to the origins of anthropology (Braunholtz 1970: 7). From another perspective, it was a cruel irony that collections formed at the margins of the British Museum’s Classicist and Orientalist scholarship and now further marginalised by expulsion from the British Museum itself should be overseen by the heroes of this Eurocentric scholarly tradition. Perhaps Fagg was making the best of a bad situation. Although the facade of the building was actually quite inappropriate to its new contents and the grand entrance hall with its ornamental plasterwork had been painted battleship grey as if the British Museum lacked money as well as imagination, the building was transformed under his leadership into a remarkable showcase for the Ethnography collections. Ethnography was moved from the Bloomsbury site to make space until the British Museum’s vast Library could be separated from the antiquities departments and relocated to a new site. The new British Library was only built on the Euston Road after plans to flatten the whole block in front of the British Museum had been defeated by a campaign to preserve its historic architecture. The Library, originally at the core of the British Museum, had grown during the nineteenth century as the British Museum was rebuilt from a large mansion house into a huge neo-Classical monument. It occupied first the new east wing, then the north wing, and then the Round Reading Room was built in the central quadrangle, followed by humbler buildings which eventually filled the remaining space. I remember a labyrinth, the Reading Room surrounded by book-stacks in three concentric circles on five floors, with each level, circle or point of the compass indistinguishable from the rest. What later became the Great Court was a maze of book-stacks, offices and passages which required a guide to find a way through. There were rumours of staff who had died or killed themselves in the book-stacks only being found weeks later.

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While the antiquities departments were waiting to claim all this space, their collections were also expanding. Something had to go and it is not hard to see why Ethnography was chosen. Apart from being large enough to make a difference, it was at the bottom of a hierarchy still persisting from the nineteenth century which classified the peoples of the world and their cultures into Western, Oriental and Primitive. Primitive cultures, although defined by colonial prejudice rather than historical or social criteria, were a category which the public could appreciate, provided of course that they did not have to puzzle over the meaning of ‘ethnography’. So, following precedents like the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and the Museum of Man in Ottawa, the British Museum decided to move its ‘primitive’ artefacts out and into a ‘Museum of Mankind’. For the Ethnography keepers, the Museum of Mankind was an opportunity to present their collections in ways that did justice to the culture and humanity of ‘primitive’ societies, which they usually preferred to call ‘tribal’. The exhibition policy of the new museum allowed them to experiment with new types of presentation, instead of attempting to exhibit a sample of the whole of their vast collections in the kind of visible-storagewith-labels which had been the permanent displays in the Ethnography and most other galleries at the British Museum. The Ethnography displays had been organized by Bill Fagg after the War, but now he presided over a programme of many temporary exhibitions which each focused on particular societies, collections or cross-cultural themes. This was relatively expensive in labour, materials and intellectual effort, but it brought out the creativity of the keepers, designers, museum assistants and technicians to provide the visiting public with memorable museum experiences. During its thirty years’ lifetime, the Museum of Mankind became known for exhibiting artefacts to show their original cultural contexts, through explanatory texts, photos of people and places, often with reconstructions of buildings and even people. This had already begun modestly at the British Museum with a small freestanding exhibition away from the Ethnography galleries of a collection made in the 1960s by Bryan Cranstone in New Guinea. Everyday artefacts and striking carved shields and house-boards were displayed with five-foot photo

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Figure 1.3. Part of the Oceania section of the British Museum Ethnography Galleries in 1963, with Harold Gowers, Senior Conservation Officer, and, behind the glass, David Boston, Assistant Keeper and later Director of the Horniman Museum. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

panels of the Telefomin people, as photographed by Museum Assistant John Lee before he went into Conservation. This approach became known as ‘ethnographic’, in the more or less literal sense of cultural description, in contrast especially with ‘art’ exhibitions which emphasised the aesthetic qualities of the artefacts. Over the years, as the fashion for treating ‘ethnography’ as ‘art’ was set by prominent museums in America and Europe, the Museum of Mankind followed the trend and became more arty, but the art was there from the outset. The early publicity leaflets for the Museum of Mankind were subtitled ‘The British Museum collections of Ethnography and Primitive

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Art’. Curiously enough, when it opened to the public in 1971 with ten exhibitions, those which provided the strongest contrast between the ethnographic and art approaches were both curated by Bill Fagg. Fagg had made his name by artefact research in Africa, particularly Nigeria, from the end of the 1940s onwards, organising exhibitions and publishing books and catalogues on African art. He shared an aesthetic interest in African sculpture with friends among the artists, collectors and dealers who had inherited the legacy of the Primitivist art movement of the early twentieth century. He may not have endorsed the Primitivist fantasies of African and Pacific Islands sculpture representing human nature free of the cultural constraints which stultified the conventional Western art of their time, but he did assume that Western connoisseurs could perceive from the forms of sculpture the aesthetic and spiritual values which their makers were trying to express, and judge their success in doing so. Hence the saying attributed to him when once asked to identify a sculpture: ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s a good one of its kind’. He also regarded art styles as representing the identity of ‘tribes’, however ambiguously defined, from a colonial perspective on colonised societies which was already becoming discredited by his time (Fagg 1965: 13). This explains one of his first Museum of Mankind exhibitions, The Tribal Image. It comprised eighty wooden human figures from many parts of the world standing in the open on separate plinths in the prominent mezzanine gallery on the main staircase. Fagg wrote in the exhibition catalogue that his selection, advised by his friend the sculptor Leon Underwood, was subjective and ‘based on sculptural interest and quality’, that is, according to their own Western contemporary art values (1970). One of the less arty members of the Department compared it aptly to Paddington Station, for the crowd of figures standing around. Fagg’s ‘ethnographic’ exhibition was Divine Kingship in Africa, dominated by some of the British Museum’s huge collection from the city of Benin in Nigeria. Its most striking feature was an open reconstruction of a courtyard from the king’s palace, with the famous brass plaques of elaborately costumed figures mounted on wooden pillars supporting the roof, as they

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Figure 1.4. A reconstructed altar to a departed king in the Benin section of Bill Fagg’s Divine Kingship exhibition of 1970 to 1973, with carved tusks on brass heads. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

might have appeared in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. Along one wall were two low semi-circular altars, made by our carpenter a bit too neatly to look quite like the clay platforms they were supposed to be. On these were great carved elephant tusks mounted on brass heads in kingly regalia and various other cast brass figures and ritual objects. The altars were modelled on the shrines to deceased kings photographed by the British forces who conquered Benin in 1897 and looted all these things from the palace. The exhibition did not have much to say about this event, nor did Fagg’s catalogue anticipate the controversy which the British Museum later had to deal with over receiving stolen goods. He used the exhibition to illustrate the grandeur and sanctity of African kingship, complementing the Benin display with artefacts from kingdoms elsewhere in Africa, which he continued to refer to as ‘tribes’. But for all his primitive art approach to African artefacts, Fagg was the first and, so far, the last British Museum curator to demonstrate how the ‘Benin bronzes’ were meant to be viewed by those they originally belonged to. It set a precedent that his colleagues built upon in the reconstructive exhibitions that the Museum of Mankind became famous for in the years that followed. The other inaugural exhibitions of the Museum of Mankind included The Potter’s Art in Africa curated by Bill Fagg to em-

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phasise form rather than technique, and the jewel-like Aztec period Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico on golden backgrounds in spot-lit cases with historical documentation by Assistant Keeper Liz Carmichael. More ethnographic exhibitions showed the sparse possessions of The Hadza foragers of Tanzania, collected by the anthropologist James Woodburn, and Spinning and Weaving in Palestine by Assistant Keeper Shelagh Weir focused on mundane technologies to explore people’s ordinary lives as illustrated by enlarged photos. This first generation of exhibitions set the tone for those which succeeded them over the next thirty years. By the time I re-joined the Department in 1974, most of them were gone, but I recall them well from my university years, when I returned intermittently in the vacations to earn a few weeks wages working in the Conservation workshop. My colleagues now enjoyed teasing me as a ‘bloody student’, over-educated but useless, which demonstrated to me the futility of the left-wing university activist slogan ‘Students and workers unite!’ Why should workers unite with those they regarded as middle-class wasters on their way to becoming their over-educated but useless bosses? This did not lose me my friends, who kept me in touch with what seemed a more real and solid world than the privileged hedonism of student life and helped me to avoid, or at least postpone, becoming what one Maoist student friend used to call a ‘fucking academic’. What I was lucky to miss during those years was the move of the stored Ethnography collections from the British Museum to a new home in a warehouse in a backstreet in Shoreditch. The Museum of Mankind itself had little storage space so they had to go somewhere the rents were cheaper, despite the inconvenience and inefficiency of moving artefacts and staff regularly between Shoreditch and Mayfair. We called the Stores Orsman Road, for the name of the street. The building was certainly an improvement on some of the old British Museum storage, particularly the KEB, the basement under the King Edward gallery at the north end of the British Museum where the huge Oceanic collections were stored. I remember things jumbled in boxes of various shapes and sizes, with many others lying on open shelving and black with London soot. The lowest shelves and the objects on them also had a watermark where the basement

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Figure 1.5. Part of the Oceania store in the KEB in 1960, with standard plywood boxes and open shelves, including racks of clubs. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

had flooded, highlighted by a white tideline of DDT which had been sprayed to prevent insect infestation. Bryan Cranstone as Deputy Keeper oversaw the move from the British Museum and Les Langton went from Senior Conservation Officer to become the first manager of Orsman Road, with Albert Davis as his faithful deputy and eventual successor. Les managed the packing and storage improvements and devised many of them himself, in the absence of standardised museum fixtures and fittings at the time. Everything of small or moderate size went into large standard plywood boxes or smaller fibreboard boxes within them, padded with acid-free tissue paper. Sliding racks were built for spears, arrows and clubs and custom made crates with internal supports for large and fragile objects. Les measured up the new store for racking, workshops, offices and all the facilities for a modern museum store, but not everything went smoothly. When he got to the toilets and found a cubicle measuring twelve feet, he was not amused to discover that all his measurements were six feet out, because Mick had repaired a frayed tape measure by cutting off the end. More seriously, the racking installed by the gov-

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ernment Property Services Agency was supposed to be seven shelves high but for some reason they built it to only six, and all the plinths at the bottom had to be removed to accommodate another row of shelves. The move really got going in January 1971, after the Museum of Mankind with its new exhibitions had opened the month before. The most urgent priority was to clear the Ethnography galleries in preparation for the forthcoming Tutankhamun exhibition of 1972, a famous event that had visitors queuing round the block. As John Osborn recalled, the biggest operation was bringing out the huge Solomon Islands war canoe, over eleven metres long, which had dominated the Oceania gallery since it arrived in 1927. It was too tall to go through the front doors of the British Museum so they built ramps to raise it over the doors and take it through the window above, and even then they had to cut off the prow and stern posts. The staff who actually moved the collections from the galleries and stores in the basements included half a dozen museum assistants and three or four masons’ assistants or labourers who packed the artefacts, with carpenters Sid Hunter and George Griffin making crates and cradles for large objects. Three days each week was spent preparing lorry loads for transport to Orsman Road and two days unloading and shelving. The move was completed by 1974, apart from a few large objects which came later, and the collections were once again opened to researchers, in better condition than ever before. Another important gain for Ethnography at the Museum of Mankind was the gift of the large and comprehensive library of the Royal Anthropological Institute, which the RAI was finding too expensive to accommodate and manage in its headquarters in Bedford Square near the British Museum. With Ethnography’s already substantial library, including ancient tomes going back to the early years of the British Museum, this became the biggest anthropology library in Britain and one of the largest in the world. When it was formally donated to the Museum of Mankind in 1977, it was crammed into a vaulted cellar that became known as the Open Stacks (open, that is, to Fellows of the RAI), as distinct from the Closed Stacks housing the old Ethnography Library at the other end of the basement. With it came its staff, including the venerable long-serving

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Librarian, Miss Kirkpatrick and a young assistant, Chris Spring, who eventually became a senior curator from an interest in Africa first inspired by the books he pulled off the shelves. Half the Department’s junior staff were based at Orsman Road to care for the collections, getting them in and out of boxes as needed while working to improve the storage and incorporating new acquisitions. The academics, as keepers and research assistants, with the conservators, administrators and librarians, were based at ‘Burlington’, as the Museum of Mankind was referred to. The high morale and corporate spirit that enabled the Department to function so well on two sites several miles apart, under the ultimate control of the British Museum half a mile away, owed a lot to the sociability, enthusiasm and humour of the staff. Before everyone left the British Museum site, Bill Fagg had a stroke, from which he recovered only to speak even more slowly than before. I have heard that when he returned to work on his bicycle the staff formed an arcade of African spears for him to ride through down the ramp leading under the east wing. At Burlington the Conservation Workshop in the basement continued for some years to be the place for tea and lunch breaks and there was a small soldering shop where the smokers, now including myself, would cram into afterwards because the brazing hearth exempted it from the fire regulations which made most of the building ‘no smoking’. Albert continued to be the butt of more jokes than anyone else, and much ingenuity was used to tease him when his work took him to Burlington. There was a row of tall narrow lockers in the conservation basement for staff to keep their coats and personal possessions, and Albert had to face all kinds of difficulties in getting into his. First we ran a strip of transparent sticky tape down the edge of the door and the jamb, but once discovered this was easy to check for next time. So we put a pin in the keyhole, hard to spot and making it impossible to get a key in. Finally, when he probably thought he was safe, we switched around the two blocks of lockers which made up the row. This required removing the graffiti which adorned Albert’s locker in particular and reproducing it on the one which took its place, so he could not understand why his key would not turn in the lock. One joke which really tested Albert’s sense of humour was when I wrote

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a letter saying that his services were no longer required and he would be transferred elsewhere. We had it typed on official headed paper and Harold Gowers forged Bill Fagg’s signature. When Albert received it he was so upset that he was about to storm off and go home, until Harold made him check the signature and then, thank God, he laughed. This was the Ethno I returned to after five years studying anthropology at University College. In 1974, just as my studentship and grant were ending, a new graduate post of ‘Research Assistant, Education’ came up at the Museum of Mankind, and I got it. I had left the British Museum at Bloomsbury as a half trained assistant conservation officer, dressed in the style of my colleagues with short hair, heavy black rimmed glasses, collar and tie, sports jacket and grey trousers (unfortunately immortalised in a photo at Adrian Digby’s retirement party which has haunted me ever since; see Fig. 1.2). I came back with a BSc and half-finished MPhil, long hair and droopy moustache, wire rimmed glasses, colourful tee shirts and jerseys, flared trousers and definitely no collar and tie. This change of fashion reflected a boom in tertiary education in which most of us were the first in our families ever to go to university, supported by decent public grants and bank overdrafts which could be paid off from a year or two of employment. We enjoyed liberties our parents never had during their wartime and post-war youth and were reacting against the old hierarchies and formalities of the British class system. There was a mood of political optimism in the country that working-class and left-wing movements would be able to challenge the vested interests of ruling elites and the racism and sexism of everyday life. Such attitudes were even penetrating the Museum of Mankind, if not so much the British Museum at Bloomsbury. Since I left, all the staff had started calling each other by their first names, and it was no longer ‘Mr Cranstone’ and ‘Miss Weir’ but ‘Bryan’ and ‘Shelagh’, which I had some trouble getting used to. ‘Mr Fagg’ had retired as Keeper shortly before I arrived and although everyone hoped and expected that Bryan Cranstone would succeed him, Fagg’s rather shaky administration apparently persuaded the Trustees that they needed some new blood. They appointed Malcolm McLeod, about thirty years younger than Fagg and then unknown to the Department. ‘Mac’ had worked in Ghana and re-

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searched among the Asante people, and had an informal matey approach that appealed to the junior male staff. Dress code had changed too, and some of the younger junior staff had abandoned collar and tie and grown their hair. Mick Goddard now came to work in a tee shirt, jeans and a beard, and had inserted flares in the trousers of the brown tweed suit which he now wore only for best. Visitors who managed to find the Museum of Mankind in its obscure Mayfair backstreet really enjoyed and remembered it. Compared with the British Museum’s grand galleries with their vast and intimidating array of bleached antique sculptures, endless rows of glass cases filled with archaeological fragments, Greek vases and Oriental ceramics, enlivened for most only by the Egyptian mummies, the Museum of Mankind introduced exotic cultures through imaginative exhibitions and colourful artefacts. You could see it all in one visit and then come back in a year or so and see something different, and in due course there were activities to engage children and adults in other people’s ways of life. The new Museum was a welcome contradiction to the justified criticism that the grandeur and solemn demeanour of museums intentionally alienates ordinary visitors (Belk 1995: 108) and it actively promoted the culture and humanity of the British Museum’s ‘savage and barbarous peoples’.

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or all its novelty and innovation, the Museum of Mankind remained part of the British Museum, from which it could never escape and to which it was fated eventually to return. I often thought of the British Museum as a microcosm of British society, with a hierarchy of all classes of persons and occupations. It was presided over by a self-perpetuating elite of trustees who employed the staff, from academics and managers through various grades of administrators, technicians and clerks to unskilled labourers, messengers and warders. It had its own folklore, traditions and rules and a liberal ethos which allowed dissent providing it didn’t threaten to change anything very much, in which case it could stamp on people hard. The occupational hierarchy corresponded naturally to the British class system, with aristocracy and high-achieving worthies among the trustees, the upper middle classes among the keepers, lower middle classes in the junior curatorial and administrative grades, skilled working-class tradesmen doing technical work, and unskilled menial jobs carried out by a disproportionate number of non-European immigrants. As members of a single institution about a thousand strong, people of different occupations and classes probably mixed more than in British society at large, at least until government policies obliged the British Museum to privatise most of the lower-grade jobs by contracting out services such as building maintenance and cleaning. The Museum of Mankind was a province within the British Museum, less class conscious than Bloomsbury but with a similar hierarchy of jobs from Keeper down to Labourer. Some functions such as personnel, security and exhibition design continued to be managed from the British Museum, but in Ethnography the staff formed a strong team across grade and class. The community had its conflicts, including some serious irrec-

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oncilable grievances among the keepers, but people knew each other well enough to work well together, and some of them flourished. As time passed, most staff looked back on the Museum of Mankind in its earlier years as a happy and satisfying place to work. By some curious coincidence, the occupational hierarchy at the Museum of Mankind was reflected in the location of the staff in the building, from the basement to the third floor. Right at the bottom, in both senses, was the labourer, whose job was to fetch, carry and clean. Particularly memorable from the early years was Royston, a tall gangling lad in his early twenties, middle class, slightly camp and given to baggy jerseys and a trailing knitted scarf. He made beautiful drawings and models of Georgian house interiors, admired by all, but as a labourer he was bloody useless. Instead of getting on with routine jobs like sweeping out the carpenters’ shop or changing the towels in the toilets, he’d hang around sharing existential anxieties with patient listeners. Once when sent out to buy cheese rolls and return with change, he spent all the money on cream cakes instead. Fortunately, he left for better things but returned for social visits from which we learned that eventually he became a well-known and well-paid architectural model maker. Royston was succeeded by a couple of other men who were too capable to stay long in the job before moving off to something better, and then by someone who was really suited to it. Tony Wiltshire was a portly Londoner of about sixty with slicked back white hair and bottle bottom glasses, who wore a blue boiler suit and walked with his head on one side, ‘with a list to starboard’ as Mick put it. He came to us from a gin factory where he had been bullied for being slow and not very bright, but at the Museum of Mankind he was respected for being methodical, conscientious and obliging and well liked for his good nature. He kept the Tea Room clean and had his own corner in its inner sanctum where he smoked his pipe. He only occasionally lost his cool but was remembered for once throwing the Tea Room telephone out of the window after it had been ringing repeatedly, only to stop each time he got up to answer it. A gallery warder’s job was an improvement on labouring, if you could endure standing around all day. Some enjoyed

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studying the exhibitions and even explaining them to visitors, at the risk of being told off after complaints by the keepers that they didn’t know what they were talking about. Security warders had more responsibility and included ex-coppers, working under a regime of rules which owed as much to dogma as to common sense and seemed to promote some of its supervisors accordingly. They had an office in the Front Hall and a Control Room by the Back Gate from where they monitored the building in shifts day and night and issued our keys at the staff entrance downstairs. Since warders were all managed and often rotated from the British Museum, they were rather marginal to the social life of the Ethnography Department. Only a few got to know us well but those that did recalled in later years at the British Museum how much they enjoyed it there. They had their own mess in the basement, which few of the Ethnography staff felt very comfortable using, except some of the labourers. The practical work underlying the care and exhibition of the collections was done by the people in the basement workshops. Mick Goddard had developed from a Museum Assistant for the African collections at the British Museum into an ingenious inventor of exhibition fixtures and fittings, useful and amusing gadgets, fancy dress costumes and furniture. His early techni-

Figure 2.1. The Control Room in 1997, with Security Warders Chris Norton, Eddie Crossly and Tony Brueton. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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cal work included repairing Bill Fagg’s bicycle, which he rode each day for over seven miles from Barnes to the Museum of Mankind and always seemed to be going wrong. In the reorganisation of jobs as the Museum of Mankind established itself, Mick became installed in his own workshop in the basement, and took charge of making fittings and mounts for artefacts for exhibition and storage. In the early 1970s, in preparation for getting married, he built a bed for his new house in that workshop and scavenged a set of Heals oak chairs left at Burlington by the previous occupants and discarded by the Museum, which was always throwing out good quality old furniture and buying poor quality modern substitutes. Mick worked with the carpenters to build the exhibition cases on the gallery grid and he was in charge of the humidifiers that regulated their internal atmosphere and the thermohydrographs that measured it. He made his own flexible ducting to improve air circulation by coiling wire and covering it with polythene fixed with adhesive tape. He also devised new ways of working the dense polythene foam used for soft storage fittings by cutting it with wire instead of blades in the electric jigsaw, reaming out cavities with a wooden dowel in the electric drill and welding it by searing on an electric hotplate. He used a T section aluminium bar fixed to an electric iron for sealing polythene sheet, including a waterproof overcoat for me to wear as pillion on a long-distance motorbike ride. A lot of Mick’s creations were adapted from things discarded by the Museum or in builders’ skips around Mayfair by people who were more wasteful and less imaginative than he. He would drag in solid mahogany counters and doors from refurbished banks to his timber store in the basement. One of his earliest and most successful achievements was his sculpture, made from scrap metal. He started by joining old taps together to form horses, then other metal objects such as door knobs, coat hooks, plumbing joints, old tools and obscure bits of machinery became birds, snails, acrobats, fantastic animals, human figures and whatever else their combined forms suggested to Mick’s lively imagination. Later he drew on his work with the Museum collections to make African sculptures such as Ghanaian Asante dolls from upturned shovels with earrings, a Bambara antelope headpiece, and my favourite, a simple

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mask of two garden hoes and a trowel. The sculptures were assembled with rivets and finished with a green verdigris patina of paint and polish to imitate old bronze. Mick’s talent was to perceive the artistic properties of manufactured products and reveal them by turning and combining them in unfamiliar ways to resemble something completely different, while allowing the original identity of the components to remain recognisable. The results were visual jokes with artistic properties which matched and mocked the values of the Western art world. In contrast to precedents like du Champ’s upturned urinal and Picassos’ bull’s head of bicycle seat and handlebars, Mick’s sculptures were immediately accessible and purchased for a few pounds by friends and colleagues who did not have to suffer, or pay for, the affectations of the professional artist. Mick’s workmates included the ‘technicians’, generally known as carpenters. Sid Hunter, a short man from Dover who had worked until middle age in the building trade, succeeded Geoff as carpenter while still at the British Museum, content to earn less in a steady indoor job. He was an old-fashioned working-class Tory who read the right-wing Daily Express, travelled to and from work in a blazer, collar and tie and changed in the workshop, accepted the Museum’s class hierarchy, and gained universal respect and affection as steady, helpful and genial. After Sid retired, his successor from the 1980s was the burly Andy McLeod, an irascible but good-hearted Scot, who spent his weekends building a house in northeast Scotland, where he retired shortly before the Museum of Mankind closed, never to be heard of again. Sid and then Andy’s assistant as carpenter’s mate was Paul Guzie, a stocky round-faced Londoner of my age with a beard and long hair, a dirty laugh and even dirtier sense of humour. He started at the same time as me in 1974 and we met at our formal induction at the British Museum. Over many years of pub crawls around Paul’s native north London I learned about the lingering working-class version of the counter cultural hedonism of the sixties and met some of the strange and often unhappy men who Paul had known and supported since that time with patient and tolerant friendship. In the process, Paul and I also discovered Irish folk-rock bands and in time the more obscure pubs with the traditional music of a London Irish sub-

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Figure 2.2. Mick Goddard at a display of his junk sculptures with some African artefacts from the collections that inspired him, in a case in the Front Hall in 1987. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

culture, known by Paul and others as ‘diddly diddly’ music, which I have since spent many years learning to play on the accordion. Mick often joined us on our pub crawls, later establishing a routine of Tuesday night drinks with Paul, because that was the evening he always visited his Mum in Haringey on his way

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Figure 2.3. Andy McLeod and his assistant Paul Guzie at work in the Carpenters’ Shop in 1993. (Ben Burt photo.)

home to Enfield. This routine continued long after his mother moved to his street in Enfield in her last years. Mick rode his motor bike on those as other evenings, keeping an eye open for the law because of the drink. One night, noticing a police car coming up behind, he pulled up short to avoid jumping the traffic lights, stopped dead and fell over, only for the police car to shoot through the red light without noticing. The conservation workshop was also in the basement, until it was moved to a new ‘Laboratory’ in a building next to the Stores in 1979. By now the junior staff had received professional training and qualifications from the Institute of Archaeology of London University and Harold Gowers was in charge of John Lee, Tom Govier and Linda White, who succeeded me after I went to university. A longer-term facility in the basement was a small photographic studio and darkroom, at first in the charge of Henry Brewer, a man in his fifties with an airforce handlebar moustache. He was an obliging colleague but insisted on arguing politics in the Tea Room, immovable in his economic justifications for right-wing government policies. The culture of the basement workshops was very male, although

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challenged by Linda White’s presence for a few years. Then Helen Wolfe was recruited as Mick’s assistant in 1976 and, despite his initial doubts about having a ‘girl’ doing a man’s job, her previous experience in shop window display, her technical and organisational abilities and her tolerant personality won him over. Helen became one of the lads, who were rather less laddish as a result, but it was many years before some men of the Department, at all levels, lost their sense of superiority over their female colleagues. One way up the stairs from the basement to the ground floor was through the Students’ Room, which was the British Museum’s antique name for the place where the public came to contact the academic staff and research the collections. The staff actually based there were so-called ‘research assistants’, qualified by being graduates, who worked for the assistant keepers of the various sections. The room had dark veneer panelled walls, a spectacular moulded plaster ceiling and a green marble fireplace, but was furnished with dull modern tables and chairs on a dingy grey carpet. ‘Students’ did occasionally find their way in and researchers sometimes studied objects from the collections there, but it was mostly general public enquiries. It was

Figure 2.4. The Students’ Room at Burlington in 1997, with Hans Rashbrook at the reception desk and Jim Hamill at the table. To the right are the folders of photos of the collections. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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a few years before an Information Desk was installed in the front hall, where Christine Bard or ‘Miss-information’ was the first of many to filter out the most routine enquiries. In time the British Museum Information Service took over the management and training of the Desk staff, who also booked school visits and provided leaflets for them under my direction. The Desk always had a large vase of flowers, provided by Arthur, an elderly florist who Malcolm McLeod had allowed to set up his stall in one of the Museum of Mankind’s empty forecourts. At first I shared the back office and the duties of the Students’ Room with other young research assistants. Socially, we were in the middle of the museum hierarchy, with a choice of who to mix with, even as most moved upwards on the way to greater things. Penny Bateman from Canada became my boss and a good friend when she was promoted to the Education Office at the British Museum, Yvonne Neverson, a sparky Black British woman, left to work in the Commonwealth Institute, and John Mack, who lived down the road from me and also became a friend, eventually became Keeper of the Department. Their replacements during the 1980s included Tony Shelton, a romantic figure in black from his wavy hair to his leather trousers and cowboy boots who eventually became Director of the University of British Columbia Museum, and Sarah Posey, who became Keeper of World Art at Brighton Museum. Sarah was succeeded by Mike O’Hanlon, a rather serious anthropologist with a dry sense of humour who became an assistant keeper and then Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Chris Spring moved from supervising the Library Reading Room to succeed Yvonne, who he later married, and later became a senior Africa curator. I was never actually promoted, but moved up to my own small office on a back stairway as I tried to focus more on education work and free myself from public enquiries. Of all these people, Penny Bateman was perhaps the one who best bridged the divide between the technical and academic grades of the Museum of Mankind. She came to share a house with Helen Wolfe from the basement and was also friends with Assistant Keepers Liz Carmichael, for the Americas, and Shelagh Weir, for Asia and Europe. These were probably the most difficult of the senior staff to work with, being at once intelligent and dedicated and sometimes touchy and dominating,

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no doubt because they always had to fight the unacknowledged sexism of the British Museum as the first women to gain such positions in the Department. Their offices were, appropriately enough, up on the first floor near the galleries and their neighbour there was Dorota Starzeka from Poland, Assistant Keeper for Oceania, kindly and methodical with the tidiest office in the building. She began as Bryan Cranstone’s deputy in 1973 and succeeded him when he left to become Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1976. Also on that floor, but tucked away in a sunless back room cluttered with metal racking bookshelves, was Jonathan King, recruited in 1975 as Assistant Keeper for North America. He gave the impression of the archetypal public schoolboy, self-assured and charming, until crossed, and very confident in his own talents. When I gained my own first floor office it was on the other side of the building, secluded enough for me to practice my Irish accordion after work to avoid annoying my neighbours at home, and at the top of some back stairs which provide my favourite examples of administrative idiocy. The stairs led directly to the basement near the staff entrance, past a door to a defunct lift that had been screwed shut then fitted with a door closer by some unsupervised contractor, and down to a door locked on a special key held only by Security. To pass this you had to go instead out down the public main staircase and back through another locked door on the ground floor to reach the basement. Failing to persuade Security to change the lock, I used to hop over the bannisters between the stairways, demonstrating the irrelevance of that door at some risk of injury. After many years someone just removed the door. On the second floor, the spatial hierarchy was slightly compromised. There was the Library Reading Room, from where visitors could order up books from the book-stacks far below, staffed by Library Assistants who were always the most helpful of colleagues, pursuing references even more assiduously than you might want them to. Then along a passage was the General Office with an administrative officer, a clerical officer and several typists and messengers. This was the communications centre for the building from where the messengers toured the offices twice daily, collecting scribbled notes for the typists as they delivered the post, taking the typing back again to be

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signed and sealed and collected once more, as memos to be delivered around the building and to the British Museum and the Stores, as letters to post, and as carbon copies to be filed. All of this kept two or three women employed and they brought conversation and gossip to solitary offices on their rounds. One of the longest serving and most fondly remembered was Ismay Harris from Barbados, humorous and motherly but strict on any lapses into bad language. In the old tradition of the British Museum, her son grew up to take a job there as a security warder. In the 1990s the Office moved (more appropriately perhaps) to a room in the basement. By then, as staff started buying computers for their offices from the late 1980s and the British Museum gradually introduced digital facilities, including e-mail, the old system of paper communications was gradually being superseded. By the time the Department returned to the British Museum the messengers had gone and only one (digital) typist remained, Sue Vacary, working for the Library but also helpfully typing my hand-written book drafts. The symbolic hierarchy was resumed on the third floor with the Keeper’s large office, which had a view over the rooftops but was slightly compromised in prestige by access via a steep narrow staircase, as the lift reached only to the second floor. Malcolm McLeod’s neighbours there were John Picton, Deputy Keeper until 1979, then John’s successor as Deputy, Brian Durrans, who came from the Maritime Museum to take charge of the Asian collections, and later Assistant Keepers John Mack, promoted in charge of East and Southern Africa in 1979, and Nigel Barley for West Africa who arrived in 1980. The keepers were trained and qualified as academic experts, but they did not necessarily have the skills or temperament for the role of senior managers which their posts entailed. Some could be arbitrary and disrespectful to their juniors, leading to rows when they were challenged, but I was reassured to find that the ones I fell out with also upset most of their other junior colleagues at one time or another. The result was usually a standoff followed by a period of avoidance before resuming business as usual with a bit more tact on both sides. For the first decade I had no line manager and was left to work things out for myself in consultation with the Education Officer of the

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British Museum, but I was involved in a few disputes that got me jumped on by Malcolm as Keeper. The seniority of academic staff over museum assistants and technicians was reinforced by the fact that they had very little in common and were actually rather shy of one another. I remember my working-class colleagues, confident and amusing people with lots to say for themselves, becoming inhibited and stilted in conversation with the keepers in social gatherings as they tried to adjust their speech to the dominant middle-class discourse and accent. It is a feature of British class culture that those lower down the social scale tend to feel self-conscious about the way they speak in the presence of those at the top, who generally feel no embarrassment as long as they are able to mix with the lower classes on their own terms. Despite having relatives with even posher accents than most people in the British Museum, I found myself reacting in the same way, especially when meeting people like the trustees. When these superior beings had a ‘visitation’, middle-ranking staff like us research assistants were invited to meet them in the Keeper’s office. While the likes of art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich and anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach hobnobbed with the keepers, we had little to do but offer them drinks, often to be dismissed as a nuisance by a patrician wave of the hand. An exception which proves the rule was David Attenborough. In 1975, the Museum of Mankind staged an exhibition to complement his television series The Tribal Eye, which featured objects from our collections in films made in their source communities around the world. When I wandered into the exhibition opening, David Attenborough, who didn’t know me from Adam but could see from my youth and casual appearance that I was of no particular account, immediately came over and offered to get me a drink. Years later, when he too became ‘Sir’ and a British Museum trustee, he still retained these rare qualities of a true gentleman. At Burlington, the social centre where everyone met, if at all, was the Tea Room, fitted out on the third floor after several years in the building to bring the junior staff into the orbit of the seniors, whose offices were close by. This made it as far away as possible from everyone else but none the less it drew from the basement all those who had taken their breaks in the Conserva-

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tion Workshop and soldering shop, as well as the Library staff. It had a smoking permit and kitchen facilities, used especially by Paul Guzie to cook his big dinners based on end-of-day supermarket bargains, allowing him to go to an evening job in a youth centre and then to the pub without missing his main meal. At first the Tea Room provided a meeting place where staff of all grades would get together in a friendly group, but over time they segregated themselves unconsciously according to class and occupation. There was a large room with easy chairs and coffee tables, rather like the saloon bar of a pub used by the less sociable middle class and the passing trade. The Library staff ate their sandwiches quietly there and the keepers would sometimes come in for their own rather cliquey academic conversations. Others from the basement sat in a cosy huddle in a small back room big enough for three tables and half a dozen chairs, like the public bar where working-class regulars met at predictable times for predictable company. The regulars were Sid, Mick, Paul and Tony, who kept the whole Tea Room clean and tidy, often joined by Helen and myself.

Figure 2.5. The inner sanctum of the Tea Room in 1981, with Mick Goddard, Helen Wolfe and Sid Hunter (helping himself to my tobacco tin). (Ben Burt photo.)

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The Tea Room also welcomed visitors like Albert Davis from his base in the Stores, who continued to provoke his colleagues. There was a tin on which Mick had mounted the hand from a dummy with a slot in the palm to receive everyone’s contributions to the tea fund, and into it Albert once ostentatiously dropped a worthless coin left over from a holiday in Greece. We couldn’t let him get away with that, so I got a small mahogany faced plaque, bent the coin a bit and tarnished it and stuck it in the middle. A painted inscription underneath read ‘Presented by Albert Davis, SMA, KEB (that is, Senior Museum Assistant, King Edward Basement) to his colleagues in lieu of payment for a cup of tea’, with his oft spoken motto in a circle around the coin, ‘What do you want, my life’s blood?’ That plaque occupied a place of honour on the Tea Room wall until the Department left Burlington. Albert wasn’t the only target of these jokes. Sid Hunter once found his work shoes nailed to the floor of his carpenters’ shop. Another time, when Paul and I were on a pub crawl in Stoke Newington one summer evening, we found half a set of false teeth in the gutter, took them to work the next day, put them in a jam jar of water with a label saying ‘Sid’s teeth’ and left them on a shelf above the Tea Room sink. Everyone knew that Sid had false teeth and later that day he received a phone call in his workshop from Liz Carmichael, the formidable Assistant Keeper for the Americas, who told him it was really not hygienic for him leave his teeth in the Tea Room! This embarrassed them both, to the great amusement of everyone else. One occasion when the tensions of rank, class and personalities were relaxed was the Ethnography Christmas Party. This was always organised by the junior staff, even back in the British Museum, when I remember everyone in the workshops going to the Bull and Mouth at lunchtime and drinking right through the party in the afternoon and into the evening. John Osborn, the young Museum Assistant for Asia, played mad flamenco guitar in the afternoon and was found lying flat on his face in the passageway at the end of the day. The keepers joined in, at least to the extent of having a drink, a friendly chat and a laugh, bringing a general feeling of amity and solidarity to the Department. It must have been at one of these British

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Museum parties that Albert Davis made a memorable slip of the tongue when he said to the Keeper, ‘Have a fag, Mr Cake’. But Christmas parties at the Museum of Mankind developed into something altogether different, with a new degree of conviviality among staff at all levels. One of the early parties staged a pantomime with Helen Wolfe as Cinderella, Shelagh Weir as Prince Charming and Malcolm McLeod and Chris Spring as the ugly sisters. Another included performances with one of the gallery warders singing and dancing while beating himself over the head with a tin tea tray. But most memorable were the fancy dress parties that followed in later years, fuelled by the irrepressible inventiveness of Mick Goddard, who spent days beforehand making costumes. One year he came as a Hawai’ian chief, inspired by the cloaks and helmets of red and yellow feathers in the current Hawai’i exhibition, only Mick’s was an adapted motorbike helmet and a cloth cloak covered with painted fluff. Another time he was a headless man, with an Elizabethan frilled collar and padded shoulders hiding his own head and a head from a dummy under his arm. Then he was Long John Silver, with one foot in a built-up boot and the other pointing down into a socket ending in a wooden peg, and of course an eyepatch and stuffed cloth parrot. Mick also made costumes for his colleagues such as, one year, enormous Mexican style sombreros of plastic packing foam. Another time he made a special outfit for Tony celebrating his labouring job which was topped off with a copper coloured lampshade helmet surmounted by a sink plunger with toilet rolls impaled on the handle. There was general overindulgence at these parties, and stories to pass around afterwards. One year Sid was well away, dancing in a clinch with Paul’s glamorous girlfriend Prue, half a head taller than either of them, with his head nestled on her ample bosom, when she mocked him with a sexual comment which he countered in the same spirit. Prue relayed this to Paul and soon everyone was teasing Sid, who seemed rather proud of the incident. Of course, there were also more romantic encounters, at Christmas parties and elsewhere, leading to several marriages (among other things). The humanity of the Museum of Mankind was well demonstrated by what happened to Tony Wiltshire. After he retired as our Labourer, he would wander in to see his erstwhile col-

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leagues, having no other social life until, after a year or two, he found a pensioners’ organisation which got him involved in amateur dramatics. He lived in a council flat in Holborn with a depressive brother who seems to have smoked himself to death, leaving Tony alone in a rundown dump. Paul Guzie was the one who called on him most often and he got us together to renovate the flat. Tony bought paint, wallpaper and nylon carpet in lurid red, and one weekend five of us turned up and spent two full days redecorating, while Tony made us cups of tea. We kept in touch with Tony until he died some years later in Middlesex Hospital, where Paul and Helen were his most regular visitors.

THREE

EXHIBITIONS The Museum of Mankind’s innovation was to change from

displays of exotic curios, arts and technologies organised by arcane academic criteria, to displays which promoted respect for the culture of the supposedly ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ peoples of Ethnography. The policy initiated under Bill Fagg was to present a series of temporary exhibitions exploring parts of the Department’s collections in depth, rather than displaying a selection from the whole superficially. He had illustrated catalogues published to accompany each of the early ones, complementing the information provided in the exhibition itself. The programme was remarkable, with more than 150 exhibitions, large and small, over the lifetime of the Museum of Mankind from 1970 to 1997 (see Appendix for a list). For each one, artefacts had to be retrieved from the Store, transported from Shoreditch to Mayfair, checked and maybe cleaned and repaired by Conservation, mounted and installed in cases with labels and panels of text and photos under the direction of the assistant keeper and, for major exhibitions, the British Museum designer, who was at first Margaret Hall. When the Museum of Mankind opened, it had fifteen numbered galleries of various sizes, reduced and re-numbered over the years to make room for a Bookshop and Cafe on the ground floor and temporary Education Activity Rooms upstairs. At the same time, small exhibitions including loans of photographs and books from the Library were installed in places such as the Front Hall, the Students’ Room corridor and the first floor landing. The infrastructure for most of these exhibitions was a grid system installed in all the main galleries, specially designed by the government Property Services Agency so that display cases could be built and dismantled as required. Aluminium posts were secured between fixings four feet apart on the floor

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and on the grid of a false ceiling to support large plate glass and wooden panels as fronts, sides and backs to cases with interior overhead lighting. Cases could be built to standard dimensions governed by the sizes of the glass, which were full size at four foot high by eight foot wide, full height by half width and half height by full width. These could be combined to line the walls of the gallery, to jut out into the room, or as freestanding islands. The system operated well, apart from the purpose built machine for moving the glass, which didn’t work and was too big to go into the lift. Manual clamp-on sucker grips were used instead, and the full-size glasses required two persons to lift them. For inside the cases a stock of wooden blocks of several standard sizes could be combined and covered with fabric as stands for the exhibits (as well as being cut up to make useful boxes and fittings). Exhibition themes followed precedents set when the Museum of Mankind opened. There were studies of particular culture areas presenting old collections of artefacts in terms of their erstwhile use in societies since greatly changed, including

Figure 3.1. A security photo of a conventional glass case display in The Solomon Islanders exhibition of 1974 to 1985, showing the grid system used to construct the cases, and a ‘book on the wall’ information panel. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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Bryan Cranstone’s The Aborigines of Australia (1972–1982) and The Solomon Islanders (1974–1985), and Dorota Starzecka’s Hawaii (1975–1985). Liz Carmichael’s The Maya (1973–1975) displayed collections of pottery, jade and plaster casts of monumental sculpture from archaeological sites in central America. Many smaller exhibitions focused on particular local artefact traditions, such as Malay Shadow Puppets (1972–1973), Smoking Pipes of the American Indians (1977–1978), Asante Goldweights (1978–1979) and Moche Pottery from Peru (1979–1982). A few, like Treasures of the Ethnographic Collections (1975– 1997) were formalist art displays. Such exhibitions were an improvement on most other British ethnography museums in their scholarship, design and interesting content, but they were still rather conventional in displaying artefacts out of time and place. Blown-up photos of people and places (at first only black and white) sometimes provided backgrounds to the exhibits, following the precedent of Bryan Cranstone’s New Guinea exhibition at the British Museum. Shelagh Weir used them with a comprehensive collection of everyday objects to give an impression of the early twentiethcentury peasant way of life of The Gonds of Central India (1973– 1975). But the most ambitious exhibitions were ‘contextual’ displays where the artefacts formed part of reconstructed scenes of buildings and often people. This was not actually a new idea, following a tradition that went back to the mid-nineteenth century of presenting the culture of distant peoples in realistic tableaux for public show. From the 1890s, museums were simulating the contexts in which people had made and used their artefacts, along with displays of stuffed animals in natural habitats, furniture and costumes in period house interiors, and open air museums of rural life. Ethnographic tableaux coexisted with exhibitions of artefacts in glass cases, arranged by culture areas as in the British Museum or grouped by types of artefacts worldwide as in the Pitt Rivers Museum, as well as the later formalist fashions which co-opted non-Western artefacts to complement Western notions of art. The Museum of Mankind employed all these exhibition styles but was celebrated especially for its reconstructions. Some critics regarded them as a kind of tourism, as if that diminished their value, but the visiting public enjoyed and remembered them.

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One of the most memorable, already installed when I began, was Yoruba Religious Cults, curated by John Picton, Assistant Keeper for Africa, drawing upon his research experience in Nigeria. In 1961, John had worked for Bill Fagg for a while to register the African acquisitions, before going to Nigeria to research and teach for nine years and then returning as an assistant keeper. Bill asked him to produce a Yoruba exhibition to replace his own Divine Kingship exhibition and he took the idea of reconstruction much further by building an old fashioned but contemporary Yoruba house with a central courtyard which visitors could walk around in a shady cloister. Carved posts supported the corrugated iron roof, with a large pot to collect rainwater (anticipating the leaks which developed in the roof of that gallery in later years), and an old carved door dumped under the eaves. Around the cloister were shrine alcoves containing the paraphernalia for each of the main Yoruba gods, as if stored between ceremonies. The building was constructed by our carpenter, Sid Hunter, directed by an imaginative designer, Bob Aitken, to be not quite straight, flat or level, and covered with earth-red plaster, achieving much greater realism than the Benin courtyard of Divine Kingship.

Figure 3.2. The courtyard of the Yoruba Religious Cults exhibition of 1974 to 1981. (British Museum postcard.)

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There were compromises in this realism. Bob was not allowed to have the chickens found running around a Yoruba house and Bill overruled John on the exact colour of the mud walls, before John realised that Bill was colour blind. More importantly, there was an excessive number of shrines for a single building and top lighting in what should have been dark alcoves so that the objects could be seen. Even then art connoisseurs complained that they could not see the artefacts properly, probably disconcerted by the carvings being treated in a Yoruba manner, as architecture and stored ceremonial equipment, rather than as ‘art objects’ under spotlights. Others enjoyed an evocative glimpse of Yoruba culture. John Picton later regretted not also featuring Yoruba textiles, local variations in art styles and the emergence of African Modernist art, which he was then barely aware of. He had actually wanted to present a more general visual ethnography of the Yoruba, showing more of contemporary life, including European style architecture, Christianity and Islam and other developments, avoiding the impression of a timeless traditional ‘ethnographic present’. The tendency of much anthropology until then to describe exotic peoples, in publications as well as museums, as living in some timeless traditional state, was a problem which the Museum of Mankind often recognised but seldom resolved. After all, most of its collections were made in the colonial period to preserve such imagined pasts just as they were disappearing. Visitors would have left Yoruba Religious Cults with an ahistorical impression of their culture but, starting from a position of complete ignorance, they learned much to compensate for this. For me, a bigger problem was that few could comprehend what they were looking at. There were no labels to spoil the illusion but the handout which provided a key to each object did not give much of an introduction to the Yoruba or their religion, nor did the text panels at the entrance. I remember a middle-aged couple coming into the exhibition, seeing several panels of dense introductory text and saying ‘I can’t be bothered to read all this’. The policy followed by the keepers and exhibition designers was to write for the average educated visitor, which in practice meant that they were addressing their middle-class peers. Even these would have balked at the ‘book on the wall’ approach

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to information panels and some exhibitions in the early years did employ a system of tiered information to make them easier to follow. Panels would have a bold heading, an introductory sentence or two and then a longer text, allowing visitors to read as much or as little as they chose and still understand the gist of the exhibition. But even these could put off the average lessor part-educated visitor, including school students, and there was an assumption that exhibitions required other resources to help them communicate. As the Research Assistant, Education, or ‘Education Officer’ as I termed myself, my task was evidently to interpret and complement the exhibitions on behalf of the keepers, or even despite them, which led me to take a critical view of the exhibitions I worked with over the years. By the 1990s it had become routine for education staff to be invited to exhibition planning meetings and information panels was a subject I always raised, advocating this since abandoned three-tier system to no effect. What the keepers of the Museum of Mankind were particularly good at was communicating through the contextual scenes which evoked exotic ways of life. Some also went beyond the British Museum’s claims to academic detachment to address public understandings of important contemporary issues. Shelagh Weir, Assistant Keeper for Asia and Europe, was a social anthropologist with a particular concern to contradict ancient Western stereotypes about Arab culture through her research in Palestine, Jordan and Yemen. Decades before Orientalist prejudices were exploited by American and British politicians to justify global ambitions as the ‘war on terror’, they were challenged by a World of Islam Festival in 1976, supported by Arab funding, seeking to improve Western understanding of these regions of the world. The Museum of Mankind contributed Nomad and City, a spectacular exhibition of reconstructions occupying the whole suite of ground floor galleries, based on collecting and research by Shelagh among the Bedouin and a Cambridge University team in the city of Sana’a in Yemen. You entered the exhibition past a Bedouin tent with all its furnishings, and sand, and then walked through a street market in Sana’a, before going through a kitchen and past a men’s sitting room from the kind of tall tenement building shown in enlarged photos of views over the city. The reconstructions were

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even more convincing than the Yoruba house, since the Festival sponsorship paid for Designer Margaret Hall to visit Sana’a, for the import of old fixtures, furnishings and utensils, and for professional film set builders to recreate scenes from the city in the galleries. The market had open sacks of spices which were regularly renewed to scent the air and recorded market sounds, while the sitting room had music and plastic stained glass windows which for many years after provided back lit decorations for the Museum of Mankind’s Christmas parties. The most important omission, as Shelagh herself acknowledged, was the rural life of Arab peasant farmers. It may seem futile for a museum to resist ideological trends such as the demonisation of Arabs and Islam, but Nomad and City acknowledged the responsibility to try by enabling visitors to make imaginary visits to Arabia. The booklets published with it were ethnographies of the Bedouin and of Sana’a, not catalogues of the exhibits like most of the Museum of Mankind’s previous publications. It was the first of the Museum of Mankind’s major exhibitions to engage with the contemporary

Figure 3.3. A view of the Sana’a market in the Nomad and City exhibition of 1976 to 1978. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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issues of its subject matter, albeit subtly and implicitly, by trying to normalise the cultures it represented. It was during the installation of Nomad and City that Helen Wolfe arrived as Mick Goddard’s assistant, beginning by working late into the nights to finish the exhibition on time in a collective effort that included the Keeper, Malcolm McLeod, helping to sweep the floor. Helen went on to work on the Museum of Mankind’s first loan exhibition, Gold of Eldorado, of treasures from Colombia, which opened at the Royal Academy in 1978 before going to Hanover and New York under her direction. By the time the Museum of Mankind closed, she had installed all its subsequent exhibitions, over a hundred altogether, and designed several of them herself. Helen later reflected that the way in which the Museum of Mankind created its exhibitions, with a small team of museum assistants and technicians led by an assistant keeper and a designer who all knew each other well, gave a feeling of shared endeavour and achievement. They were all proud of their exhibitions and enjoyed the work, and this was recognised by the inclusive opening receptions where all the staff of the Department were invited to share the drinks and congratulations with senior British Museum officials and important guests. Nomad and City was followed in the ground floor gallery suite in 1979 by Captain Cook and the South Seas. This was the grandest ever exhibition on this famous theme, a glasscase display of the Museum’s outstanding collection of early artefacts from Australia, Polynesia and the Northwest Coast of North America, curated by Dorota Starzecka and Jonathan King to set them in the context of European explorations of the eighteenth century. Ships’ interiors were evoked by timber passageways and its poster, a painting of Cook being killed by the Hawai’ians, seemed to represent an appropriate but futile reaction to colonialism. The next exhibition in this series of galleries was another reconstructive exhibition, part of an interesting response to one of the increasing number of claims being received by the British Museum for the return of artefacts acquired as colonial spoils. The king of Asante, supported by the government of Ghana, had for some time been demanding the return of royal regalia taken by the British when they invaded their capital

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Kumasi in 1874. Apparently, Bill Fagg had ignored his letters but when Malcolm McLeod became Keeper in the centenary year, the Director of the British Museum sent him to Ghana to negotiate. Malcolm, who had worked and researched in Asante before joining the Museum of Mankind, had to explain that the British Museum was forbidden by law to part with its collections and arranged instead for a collaborative research and training programme. This led eventually to the creation of a royal museum in Kumasi and, in the meantime, to an exhibition at the Museum of Mankind showing the glories of the Asante kingdom. Asante: Kingdom of Gold opened in 1981. Its buildings were more impressionistic than Nomad and City, being built much more cheaply by our own staff instead of professional set builders. Mick Goddard, provided with barely adequate visual references, coated Sid Hunter’s wooden walls for peasant houses in a forest village with imitation wattle and daub, Helen sculpted mud designs on the pillared façade of a chief’s palace, and they devised the palm leaf thatched roofs from innumerable slivers of brown paper. One limitation was that the exhibition depended on the Museum’s existing collections. These included some prestigious loot from the British invasions in the form of gold regalia and ceremonial objects, with other collections of brass castings, patterned cloths and ancestral stool relics, but so few everyday objects that the village lacked even the standard mortar for pounding food and the palace facade was the setting for nothing more than a few drums and a throne. With the most valuable regalia displayed for close viewing in glass cases, there was a tableau of three commercial manikins for which Mick and Helen had to make an imitation gold-embellished coronet and sandals for a chief with the face of American film star Sidney Poitier and caps and gold hilted swords for his retainers. The only real Asante items were their togas and the chief’s chair and stool, and it could not match Malcolm’s magnificent colour photo of an Asante chief holding court, printed at more than life size by a then novel inkjet process. The Museum’s best efforts to show the glories of the ‘Kingdom of Gold’ were inevitably cast into shade when the king of Asante himself came to open the exhibition. He entered the palace courtyard in a brilliant kente cloth toga and heavy gold

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Figure 3.4. The palace courtyard built by the Museum staff for the Asante: Kingdom of Gold exhibition of 1981 to 1984. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

regalia under a state umbrella, accompanied by chiefs only a little less lavishly dressed, speakers with golden staffs and gun-bearers with antique muskets and bandoliers, as well as some British government officials looking very dull in their dark suits. The Asante seemed very pleased with the exhibition, which proclaimed the stature of their ancient kingdom in the capital of their former colonisers. In the following months Asante visitors flocked to see it, from Ghana or from London and elsewhere. Apart from the unusual sight of Black visitors to the Museum, many could be identified by the colourful togas, shawls and gold ornaments donned for their visits, and they were happy to be photographed in the exhibition, with Malcolm McLeod. The best photo I made of these visitors showed two men pointing out a state sword which, of all the regalia looted from Kumasi, they particularly wanted to repatriate. As with Benin, the exhibition and Malcolm’s book (1981) which accompanied it skirted around the difficult issues which gave rise to such claims. Nineteenth-century photos from British colonial inva-

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sions were used to create a scenario based on those times and illustrated by old fashioned practices of the present. This tended to confound the two, rather than situating either in the history of Asante, or of Britain. Asante visitors may have been content to see their nineteenth-century kingdom represented through the legacy of twentieth-century chiefly pageantry, or even rural villages, but most British visitors would have had difficulty telling the two apart. I remember a teacher explaining that she would not bring her class to visit because it would reinforce their belief that Africans lived in ‘mud huts’. While she might have done better to question the prejudices which led to her description of African houses, she had a point insofar as the exhibition failed to set Asante in the context of modern Ghana. As with John Picton’s critique of his own Yoruba exhibition, British visitors, mostly ignorant of colonial history and life in Africa, would have seen a timeless exotic culture rather than a living cultural tradition within the Africa of the present. The response I developed from this time to support teachers and schools resulted in a leaflet summarising Asante history and culture, while pointing out the predominantly nineteenthcentury context of the exhibition. I found this approach necessary for most exhibitions, for which the idea of ethnographic context went only as far as the immediate surroundings of the artefacts, rather than the wider society and its history. A more successful reconstruction, probably the most realistic of all, was Brian Durrans’ Vasna: Inside an Indian Village, which opened upstairs the next year, in 1982. Like Nomad and City, it benefitted from sponsorship by the source country, which supplied contemporary artefacts, expert advice and the money to employ professional set builders. The result was a weaver’s house in rural Gujarat, fully furnished with a loom and everything from bedsteads to cooking pots, newspapers to radio, almost indistinguishable from the real thing, at least in photos. It even smelled right, after Mick had walked around the gallery each morning swinging a censor he made from a pierced copper ballcock containing burning cow dung, the local household fuel. There was a cart drawn by two fibreglass bullocks and a small shrine which was convincing enough to attract offerings from Hindu visitors who, like the Asante, were persuaded to come to the Museum to see their own culture

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represented. Vasna was part of a Festival of India for which there was also an exhibition in Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum, emphasising the absurdity of separating peasant and elite cultures of India into two departments, let alone two museums. Hence my teachers’ leaflet for this exhibition was a general sketch of Indian culture, from which I at least learned a great deal in writing it. Vasna became another travelling exhibition, going to Leicester, chosen because of its large south Asian population. In 1985, a year after Asante closed, the next spectacular exhibition to occupy the full suite of ground floor galleries was Hidden Peoples of the Amazon. This was a remarkable and fascinating exhibition but, as with Asante, the Museum of Mankind tried to ignore difficult colonial issues and this time the strategy backfired. The exhibition portrayed the culture of Native Amazonia with a room of beautiful artefacts in cases, leading into a communal house from the Tukano people of Colombia. Visitors walked into the building through the ceremonial area

Figure 3.5. The weaver’s house with its loom in the Vasna exhibition of 1982 to 1984. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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where model men were unpacking body ornaments for a festival and pounding coca powder, with utensils and weapons stored around the walls, a cooking fire, beer trough and hammocks hanging from the house posts. Then they went past the domestic area where women were grating manioc and cooking it as bread, extending into a dioramic model to convey the huge scale of the house, and out past a family room with all their personal possessions. The human figures were specially commissioned from model makers but the house itself had to be built on the cheap by our own people. Mick made a prototype palm leaf roof panel from card and took it to Pinewood film studios to have vacuum formed plastic panels made from it. He made banana plants of the plastic tubes from inside rolls of carpet, heat moulded and adorned with paper leaves. Helen painted the spirit inspired designs on the ‘bark’ panelled façade of the house, complaining that she did not have the benefit of the hallucinogenic drugs employed by the Tukano painters. With appropriately dim lighting which obscured the improvised building materials and the rather crude dummy people, the interior of the house had an evocative atmosphere and gave a persuasive impression of life in an Amazonian community. The comprehensive collection of artefacts was provided from recent research among the Tukano by anthropologists who the curator Liz Carmichael consulted to display them as if in everyday use within the house. Their photos illustrated the exhibition and its beautiful poster, and their films were included in the public programme. It was a quite spectacular exhibition. The problem with this impressive portrayal of the Indians was that it showed them living far and free from the other inhabitants of Amazonia and barely mentioned the colonial devastation visited on the region during the previous five hundred years and now encroaching on the Tukano. Survival International, a charity campaigning for the rights of ‘tribal’ minority peoples, had a special interest in Amazonia, having been founded in 1969 in response to shocking newspaper reports of genocidal massacres there. Its leading activists included the very anthropologists who had assisted with the exhibition and it had been invited to contribute to the concluding section. For whatever reason, Survival’s perspective was not represented, so it contacted the Museum of Mankind to complain.

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Figure 3.6. Figures of men unpacking feather ornaments for a dance in the Tukano communal house of The Hidden Peoples of the Amazon exhibition of 1985 to 1987. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

Survival pointed out that Amazonian history been ignored and complained that the only mention of the continuing dispossession of Amazonian Indians was an information panel at the end. This included photos of an urban shack made of flattened oil drums and of an Indian in traditional undress sitting on a motorbike, but with no mention that the bike actually belonged to the photographer. They raised objections with Liz Carmichael and the Keeper, Malcolm McLeod, which went up through the hierarchy to the British Museum trustees. The unfortunate response was that it was not the Museum’s business to represent such issues and that it would not be swayed by partisan pressure groups. I was already a subscribing supporter of Survival International, since it supported the kind of people studied by the anthropologists I aspired to join, so it seemed a good idea to try and resolve the dispute. As the organiser of public lectures at the Museum of Mankind, I got permission to set up a series

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with Survival to provide background to the exhibition and debate some of the issues. They put together a programme of weekly lectures by leading experts on Amazonian Indians and I sent it up the chain of command for approval. When it reached Geoffrey House, head of public services for the British Museum as a whole, he panicked and stamped on it. The introductory lecture was to have been given by Richard Bourne, Chairman of Survival and Deputy Director of the Commonwealth Institute, an important cultural organisation in its own right, but his lecture title, ‘Man on a Motorbike’, promised to address the dispute with the British Museum head on. This was too much for Geoffrey, whose overriding concern was to shield the British Museum from controversy. He cancelled the lecture series and I got a telling off. Survival brought two Amazonian Indian activists to see the exhibition, but the senior staff would not meet them and, as I happened to be having a smoke on the colonnade when they arrived, I thought it courteous to show them round. They too wrote to the Museum asking for changes to correct misrepresentations in the exhibition, but the trustees brushed them off and Survival then picketed the Museum of Mankind with placards and leaflets. Richard Bourne wrote a critical article about the affair for New Society magazine (1985) titled ‘Are Amazon Indians Museum Pieces?’ and Survival circulated copies with a special issue of its own newsletter on the current situation of ‘Forest Indians of South America’. They gave me a quantity of these newsletters which I distributed to teachers, with my own leaflet introducing the exhibition, Amazonian culture and its historical background. The British Museum didn’t notice. Perhaps Survival should have known better than to engage the British Museum in a public confrontation, which inevitably made it retreat into a defence of non-political academic impartiality, editorial independence, and so on. In fact, it was quite usual for British Museum to act politically as if it was an agency of the government, which supplied its funding, appointed many of its ostensibly independent trustees, and considered British national interests before commenting openly on human rights issues in other countries. The Museum of Mankind accepted exhibitions from foreign countries at the behest of the Foreign Office and I myself had the privilege of a two-

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week official cultural tour of Romania in 1978, with instructions to accept the smallest of several exhibitions proffered for loan by the Romanian museum authorities because, as I was told, we didn’t really want any of them but had to oblige. The unspoken attitude was that, as a prominent national institution, the British Museum should not cause diplomatic problems with foreign states, even when they were complicit in the persecution of the very people whose culture we were exhibiting. This percolated down at least as far as Malcolm, who gave me a severe reprimand a couple of years later for writing ‘West Papua’ in a leaflet advertising the Museum of Mankind’s current film programme. The name was used, then as now, by those who questioned the dubious colonial claim by Indonesia to the western half of New Guinea, but Malcolm told me we should use the Indonesian name Irian Jaya, and who was I to contradict the Foreign Office? Unlike the Commonwealth Institute, which allowed its Deputy Director to pronounce on the iniquities of Amazonian colonisation, or the BBC, which encouraged debate by broadcasting opinions contrary to government, or even the Museum of Mankind itself when it screened videos from the Granada TV Disappearing World series which showed what was making Amazonian Indians disappear, the British Museum pretended academic impartiality to avoid controversy, on this occasion in vain. As Bourne pointed out, there were public museums in other countries which addressed such issues with sympathy for the peoples whose cultures were the reason for their existence. In contrast to the Museum of Mankind’s contextual exhibitions, both conventional and reconstructive displays, the art museum approach to exhibitions introduced by Bill Fagg was a continuing undercurrent that attracted much less comment. It was maintained in the only permanent gallery, set up by Malcolm McLeod in 1975 as Treasures of the Ethnographic Collections. This was a selection of artistic objects from around the world, displayed individually in glass cases under spotlights in what was originally the London University committee room on the first floor. The room was a showcase in itself, with fine mahogany woodwork and bookcases, a patterned marble floor and an elaborately moulded and painted ceiling. As the most ornate room in the building, it was the least suited to exhibitions, so

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‘treasures’ was an easy way of making a museum gallery of it, giving people a close look at interesting artefacts with minimal intellectual effort. The exhibits were changed periodically and there were experiments with the concept of ‘treasure’ by including objects such as a Sudanese bull sculpted from cow dung. Then, in 1987, in the absence of other projects, a similar exhibition titled Introduction to the Collections was installed in one of the large ground floor galleries, for seven years. The Treasures gallery did not completely escape the kind of contentious issues that the Museum preferred to avoid. One day in the 1980s an African woman came into the Museum and the security search (at a time when the IRA was setting off bombs around London) revealed a cobblestone in her bag. She said it was ‘for my father’, was let pass and went up to Treasures to where a large gold badge, a trophy of the British conquest of Asante in 1874, was displayed mounted on huge silver-gilt plate. She smashed the glass of the display case with the cobblestone, then walked out of the Museum before anyone realised what had happened. Perhaps this was what she meant by ‘for my father’ and their ancestors. During the 1980s, museum curators in Europe and America were debating how to deal with a renewed interest in such artefacts as ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ art. In 1985, William Rubin opened his exhibition Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, displaying Modernist sculptures and pictures with the kind of African and Oceanic artefacts that had inspired their so-called Primitivist makers. That exhibition reaffirmed longstanding colonial myths of primordial artistic sensibilities but was criticised more for presenting non-Western artefacts as influences on Western artists rather than as works of art in their own right, as a kind of neo-colonial appropriation. In 1989, the Paris exhibitions Magiciens de la Terre mixed Western and non-Western artefacts in an attempt to overcome such invidious distinctions by presenting them all as ‘art’ on equal terms, which were of course Western terms. The art world response was more positive, although you might say that this exhibition reflected an alternative neo-colonialism, the French practice of making subject peoples citizens of France rather than allowing them independence.

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The Museum of Mankind’s contribution to this new art museum fashion cast a different light upon the same underlying issues of cultural colonialism. Malcolm McLeod had got to know Eduardo Paolozzi, an artist then in fashion whose practice was to adapt discarded junk, machinery and exotic artefacts to cast his own sculptures. He took inspiration from the Museum of Mankind collections and Malcolm arranged for him to curate an exhibition of his selections from them, juxtaposed with his own creations. It was called Lost Magic Kingdoms and Two Paper Moons in recognition of Paolozzi’s romantic view of disappearing exotic cultures, and it opened in 1985, the same year as Rubin’s exhibition and while the fuss about Hidden Peoples was still going on. I found Lost Magic Kingdoms the more offensive for reviving the ‘savage and barbarous’ stereotype which the Museum of Mankind had been doing so much to contradict. Malcolm, in his book for the exhibition, wrote that the apparently random jumble of artefacts in earlier ethnographic displays had influenced Paolozzi by presenting in an unprejudiced way conjunctures which challenged European preconceptions of the world (McLeod 1985). Another way to look at it was that Paolozzi enjoyed such displays of colonial trophies because they allowed him to indulge his fantasies of exotic culture without being troubled by the need to understand or respect the artefacts or their makers, or to reflect on the colonial legacy still affecting their societies. The exhibition press release claimed that Paolozzi was ‘able to communicate a unique and powerful vision and restate the potential of museum collections to help create new understandings of the world in which we live’, but these understandings were actually old ones, even then being challenged as colonial and racist. As with the Amazon, such issues appeared not to be the Museum’s business and Malcolm and his colleagues dismissed my attempts to discuss them. One result of this flirtation with the art world was a small display case in an alcove in the Museum of Mankind’s Front Hall, headed Work by Students and featuring things made at the Royal College of Art, where Paolozzi taught, purportedly inspired by the Museum. In my opinion, the best display was by our own Mick Goddard when he took the opportunity to install his junk sculptures there. He had a better eye by far than

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Paolozzi or his students for interpreting discarded artefacts as sculptures inspired by the collections of the Museum of Mankind, and none of their pretensions (see Figure 2.2). This experiment of involving Modernist artists in the creation of exhibitions was not repeated at the Museum of Mankind, although it became quite common in the British Museum in years to come. There were other attempts to present non-Western artefacts as art, of which Brian Durrans’ Traffic Art (1988–1991) was perhaps the most interesting. This combined an art gallery display of brightly painted panels from Bangladeshi rickshaws, which the art world would have called ‘folk art’, with an ethnographic exhibition of the culture and technology of the rickshaw business, including small contextual displays of workshop scenes and large blow-up photos. It was supported by a charitable organisation devoted to improving the working lives of the rickshaw pullers, which provided an excellent information pack for schools (Gallagher, Jones and Warner 1989). Other artistic exhibitions were more conventional displays of beautiful objects. From 1993, one of the ground floor rooms became a dedicated textiles gallery, with cases and fittings suitable for successive exhibitions of textiles from cultures including the Navajo (1993), Madagascar (1994), the Balkans (1994), Indonesia (1995) and Ethiopia (1995). On similar lines, with exhibits chosen for artistic interest but presented with cultural and historical background, was The Power of the Hand (1995), a grand exhibition of African arms and armour curated by Chris Spring, reflecting his vocation as an artist. Another interesting development in the Museum of Mankind’s art exhibitions was a new focus on non-Western artefacts made in the Western tradition of collection for display. The production of artefacts adapted to the Western export market had been recognised in an exhibition of Northwest Coast Native American argillite carvings as Art Made for Strangers in 1980 and Australian Aboriginal Paintings in 1992, but the Museum of Mankind’s curators were developing an interest in African gallery artists. In 1995, to coincide with the Africa ‘95 festival, Nigel Barley’s Play and Display focused on life-sized steel sculptures by London-based artist Sokari Douglas Camp of masquerades from her home area of Kalabari in southeast Nigeria, and The Pottery of Magdalene Odundo showed the

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work of an artist from Kenya. Since both made such things for exhibition in Western art galleries, they were in a sense exhibited in their ethnographic context. This irony appeared lost on the curators, who failed to reflect on the colonial history of African participation in the Western art world or apply the comparative perspective of anthropology to the alternative tradition of art history. Complementing the Museum of Mankind’s exhibitions, contextual or arty, were the real people who came to demonstrate their culture in the longstanding tradition of inviting colonised peoples to come and display themselves to a curious public. The ‘native villages’ of nineteenth-century world fairs with people pretending to live in them, and enactments such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show with defeated Lakota Indians and other even less reputable displays, have since been criticised as ‘human zoos’ whose exhibits were exploited and often treated inhumanely. But by the late twentieth century the exhibits usually had enough Western education and political support from their home countries to command the respect they deserved and were accorded by the curators. People working to reinterpret and reinvigorate their culture, often through commercial gallery art, were welcomed by the Museum of Mankind. Those who came to demonstrate for a Native American Arts programme at the Museum of Mankind in 1985 (also coinciding with the Amazon exhibition) included a Seminole patchworker, an Inuit carver and a Haida totem pole sculptor, all of whom were well able to deal with an inquisitive public on their own terms (including a visit from the Duke of Edinburgh). A decade later, another group of Native Americans from the southwest USA came for an exhibition named for an important concern of that dry region, Rain (1996–1997) and confidently demonstrated their skills in weaving, carving and painting, talking freely with the public. Not all such visitors were ‘artists’ in this sense, or as cosmopolitan as the Native Americans. When four men from the Toraja area of Suluwesi in Indonesia came in 1987 to build a magnificent carved and painted granary in one of the galleries, they received the best of hospitality. They were invited by Nigel Barley (straying from his official role as Assistant Keeper for West Africa) after he had visited them at home, returning

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to arrange their transport and visas and the shipping of all the necessary raw materials. Their leader Nenek Tulian, an old priest, spoke only Torajan, the other three also spoke Indonesian but only the youngest, the priest’s grandson Natan, spoke English, so they were very dependent on Nigel. He hosted them in his own flat, tolerating the habit of people used to constant running stream water of never turning off the taps. They did

Figure 3.7. The Toraja carvers with their finished granary in 1987: left to right, Kare, Tanduk, Natan and his grandfather, the priest Nenek Tulian. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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compromise their culture when necessary. When Nigel mishandled a knife, cut an artery and bled over their construction work, they agreed that this could substitute for the customary pig sacrifice. His relationship with them continued when he returned to Suluwesi to contribute a water buffalo to Nenek Tulian’s funeral feast some years afterwards. Later still Nigel met Natan in Singapore, now in the Indonesian diplomatic service, having used the fee from his London visit to put himself through university. Many more people from source communities, as visitors or residents in Britain, worked with exhibition education programmes, engaging with the public even more by teaching their culture and skills to school and family groups and contributing to lively festival events. Despite its reluctance to raise contentious issues of colonial history and the persecution of ethnic minorities, the Museum of Mankind’s exhibitions did a lot to humanise the ‘savage and barbarous peoples’ it had inherited from the British Museum, and gave some of them their own voices in the exhibitions and public programmes. It was one of the few museums of its time, with the Commonwealth Institute in London and the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, to exhibit the artefacts of such peoples in settings that gave them some historical and contemporary relevance. The Museum of Mankind continued its rich and varied temporary exhibition programme until it closed to the public at the end of 1997. Notable exhibitions (to be described in Chapter 6) included the Native Canadian reconstructions of Living Arctic (1987–1990), the spectacular Skeleton at the Feast on the Mexican Day of the Dead (1991–1993) and Paradise on cultural change in the Papua New Guinea Highlands (1993–1995), besides many smaller exhibitions, from Yemeni Pottery (1994) to The Ainu of Japan (1995–1996). In the final year there was the thematic Pottery in the Making on world ceramics, Brian Durrans’ Stairways to the Sky on terraced rice cultivation in the Philippines with an old granary reconstructed from unlabelled poles and planks, and Colin McEwan’s Patagonia on the history and archaeology of a vanished society at ‘the uttermost end of the earth’. After the Museum of Mankind closed, such displays became no more than occasional ‘special exhibitions’ lost among the permanent galleries of the British Museum.

F O U R

THE STORES Far away from the Museum of Mankind’s grand showcase of

exhibitions and public facilities in Mayfair, most of the Ethnography Department’s collections were stored in a warehouse in Orsman Road, a shabby backstreet of factories and council flats in Shoreditch. This was a poor working-class district of east London with a reputation for being rough, racist and risky for staff travelling home on dark winter evenings. The British Museum management did try to compensate for this. Since it took such a long time to reach the Stores on public transport from the Museum of Mankind and the British Museum, a minibus was hired to run between the three sites twice a day carrying staff and visitors, delivering the post and dropping people off at the three nearest Underground stations in the evenings. Less usefully, in the mid-1970s I had to waste a week walking around the neighbourhood listing all the local businesses because the Deputy Director hoped (in vain) that there might be one we could share canteen facilities with. The Ethnography Store was a big square five-storey building backing on to the Regents Canal, well-built but otherwise unremarkable. At ground level, past the reception desk and security office, was a ‘boat pen’ with numbers of large canoes and other big objects stacked on wheeled racking, so tightly packed that many could be reached only by crawling on the floor under the ones in front, as well as a carpenters’ shop for making storage crates and fittings, a mess room for security warders and labourers, and a fumigation chamber for killing pests. The so called ‘floors’ above were filled with rows of racking, floor almost to ceiling, holding standard sized boxes of plywood and fibreboard of artefacts packed in tissue paper, custom made ‘special boxes’ with internal fittings for large fragile objects, drawers for quantities of small things and sliding racks for long things such

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Figure 4.1. A view of the Africa floor in the early 1980s with typical storage of large plywood boxes on the racking and the fibreboard inner boxes padded with tissue paper, in which Museum Assistant Bob Eckett was laying out potshards. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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as clubs and spears. The first floor was completely filled by the Africa collections. The second floor was all the Americas and a ‘Students’ Room’ where artefacts were brought out for visitors to see, with one office for the senior museum assistants in charge of the building and another occupied in earlier years by a secretary and an administrator, as well as a First Aid room where people may occasionally have taken naps on the bed. The third floor was Oceania and a Photographic Studio with a huge archive of negatives. The fourth floor was Asia and a staff ‘Canteen’ with a kitchen and a view across the rooftops to the City of London and, until 1979, a Conservation Workshop. After most of the collections had been moved from the British Museum and stored at Orsman Road to what was, at the time, a good standard, the next major task was getting their records in order. In 1972 Bill Fagg recruited a small team to make an audit of the whole collection. They had to go through every shelf, box, rack and drawer in the Stores as well as some still at the British Museum, and check each object off against the registers. Those without identification numbers were listed on a card index with new Q (for Query) numbers, earning the team the name ‘no numberers’. Some objects had lost their labels, others had never been properly registered, including some that were so well known that they had always managed without numbers. There were more than 4,000 of them, some of which were later identified in the registers. This was good training for those interested in learning about artefact styles from one of the world’s greatest ethnography collections, and several no numberers went on to greater things. Steve Hooper was the first recruit and this helped him to catalogue a huge ethnographic collection inherited from his grandfather, which he went on to publish (Phelps 1976) before it had to be sold by Christies. In time he became an expert on Fijian and Polynesian art and a professor at the University of East Anglia. Another no numberer, Howard Morphy, became a professor of anthropology as a result of his research into Australian Aboriginal art, and Michael O’Hanlon became Assistant Keeper for Oceania at the Museum of Mankind and then Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum. Missing numbers were only one feature of the British Museum’s lax collections management over previous decades; an-

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other was the collection of ‘duplicate’ artefacts, regarded as superfluous and dumped in a separate store. A few of these were actually registered objects and many more had collection numbers but no item numbers, as if they had been partly registered and then rejected because there were too many of them in the collections already. Some were used for exchanges to acquire new objects, some I adopted for an educational ‘handling collection’, and some were recognised as rare and important artefacts and eventually reincorporated into the main collections. It is easy to see how such anomalies originated. There was always a backlog in registering new collections as they were donated or obtained on field trips faster than they could be processed. They included vast quantities of potshards from Liz Carmichael’s excavations in Honduras which awaited re-excavation as a major research project for someone else. Several keepers and assistant keepers retired leaving offices full of uncompleted work, not only papers and unreturned library books, but also artefacts whose ownership no one could be sure of. The catalogue, intended as the key to the identity and history of every artefact in the collection, was itself a huge collection of books and papers listing each item according to the number it bore. One problem for anyone trying to find information from the number was the variety of numbering systems used over the previous century and more. In Ethnography, many of the older registers were individual paper ‘slips’, illustrated by drawings in ink, many evidently by trained draftsmen. Most belonged to the huge collection bequeathed to the British Museum by Henry Christy in 1866, numbered 1 to 9999, then +1 to over +6000, including objects later purchased or donated for his collection, but some slips were numbered for other smaller sub-collections. Most of the collections were registered in huge leather-bound ledgers, with columns for date, number, description with a small, often crude, sketch, how acquired and ‘observations’. The numbering system began as year of acquisition and item number then, as collections grew, as year, month, day and item, until 1939 when it became world region (Af, Oc, Am, As), year, collection number and item. But when the acquisition of large collections would have disrupted registration work, these were entered in separate registers that did

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not necessarily transcribe everything in the previous owners’ catalogues, some of which were also an essential part of the archive. (A detailed account of this very confusing system is given in Starzecka, Neich and Pendergrast 2010: 6–7). Adding new acquisitions to the registers, with a drawing of each object, description and details of provenance and acquisition, with a number to be written on or attached to the object, was a serious time-consuming task. It was normally reserved for keepers and research assistants and recognised as an important means for them to get to know their collections. Finding your way through these catalogues in pursuit of artefacts from a particular place or culture, for a research project or an exhibition, could be a long-winded business. After the move from the British Museum, this was assisted by providing several sets of photocopies of all the registers to save everyone having to use the precious archive of original documents, henceforth kept under lock and key. It was even more difficult for visiting researchers, who had to identify by number all the artefacts they wanted to see so that they could be taken from storage and shown to them, under supervision, in the Orsman Road Students’ Room. They did this with the help of the Students’ Room staff at Burlington and, unless they had prior knowledge of what they were looking for, this usually meant looking through folders of black and white photos to find out what we had. As most of the photos had been made for previous research and publication, they were a rather biased sample and they represented somewhat less than ten per cent of the contents of collections, but they were a good way to start and, being numbered, could guide people to the registers. A list of numbers was then sent by the internal post, later on by fax, to Orsman Road, where the visitor would go by appointment, guided by a map with directions, one of my own improvised leaflets. Each regional floor had card indexes of everything stored there, one classified typologically and another by registration number with storage location, which were used to find the objects required for this and other purposes. This system continued until the 1990s. Long before, in the days of the no numberers, Shelagh Weir once suggested that computers might be useful for the collections audit, to the bemusement of her colleagues. It took a while for the British Mu-

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seum to discover the potential of digital technology to review and reorganise its huge and chaotic catalogue system. Eventually a database was developed to provide a single inventory of the collections and registration information, eventually superseding the card indexes. In Ethnography the work began in 1980 with a team of five staff led by Janet Starkey to input information from the registers. They worked with a thesaurus of names for objects, materials, places and ethnic groups and so on, to standardise the inconsistent and sometimes barely legible handwritten entries of generations of keepers, their ambiguous ditto marks and their cryptic annotations using forgotten diacritical marks and codes. Reviewing these database entries many years later gave the impression that some of the team had a rather tenuous grasp on classification. It must have been a tedious job typing in descriptions, ‘findspots’, previous owners’ names and so on for almost a quarter of a million artefacts. To speed the process, they were told to lump large groups of similar objects with separate registration numbers together in a single database entry, but at the same time they also gave some single objects with one registration number separate entries for component parts as a, b, and c. I hope someone was having a joke with the memorable case of a bamboo flask of lime for betelnut with separate database entries as ‘a’ for the flask, ‘b’ for its lid and ‘c’ for the lime inside, but it is hard to be sure. These part numbers went to ridiculous extremes, so that an object of more than twentysix parts such as a quiver of arrows would be part ‘a’ for the quiver and ‘b’ to ‘bj’ for the thirty-six arrows inside. The second phase of the project, by then known as Collections Data Management Service or CDMS, began in the mid1980s and entailed making another inventory and adding storage location codes to each database entry to facilitate finding objects when needed. Jim Hamill, who joined the team in 1985, was one who enjoyed going through every box, drawer and rack, as the no numberers had done before, learning about the collections as he viewed and checked each artefact. But the database interface only allowed him to see what he had just typed and he had to wait several days until a printout was sent back from the British Museum to check the records and use them. As the database was completed, CDMS wound down

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until only its leader, Michael Downing, remained to improve and transfer the data to the British Museum’s new Merlin database during the 1990s. By then Michael had become an unrivalled expert on the British Museum’s antique systems of collections documentation. He summarised knowledge accumulated by the CDMS team in a notebook which his colleagues continued to refer to long after he retired as the ‘Bible’ that would settle questions about registration sets and systems, their histories and anomalies. There was still a backlog of acquisitions waiting to be registered, not assisted by a programme in the late 1980s which had Chris Spring documenting new acquisitions by the novel technology of filming on UMatic video. In practice, junior curators took over much of the registration work which was theoretically the preserve of assistant keepers, and some produced the best records since the illustrated slips of the nineteenth century. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rebecca Jewell made fine drawings for the Oceania and Asia registers, before leaving eventually to become a professional artist, and Mina McElwain was noted for her drawings in the African registers. Eventually, in 1992, the British Museum stopped registering new acquisitions on paper, by which time some CDMS staff were working in permanent jobs in the Department. But all curators continued the never-ending task of editing the database, splitting group entries, removing silly part-numbers, improving documentation and adding photos of the artefacts. Most of the staff at Orsman Road were museum assistants or ‘MAs’: junior curators assigned to a particular floor, Africa, Americas, Oceania or Asia, working under the relevant keepers. They cared for the collections, managed the storage, logged things out and in as needed for research and exhibition, installed them in exhibitions at Burlington and returned them afterwards. They were poorly paid with little prospect of promotion and in the early years, as at the British Museum, most came with little education or knowledge of museum work. Although the storage at Orsman Road was a great improvement on the British Museum, the MAs were constantly working to improve it. There were too many objects in the boxes, however carefully packed, and too many large and often fragile objects on open shelves waiting for special boxes. New acquisitions

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added to the problem, put aside until they could be integrated into the appropriate area, which some never were for lack of space. Dozens of people passed through these posts during the lifetime of the Museum of Mankind, some leaving little trace and others making a lasting impression on the history of the Department. Those who stayed did so from interest in the subject and dedication to the job and they often gained an intimate knowledge of the collections in their charge, encouraged in the early years by regular talks by Bryan Cranstone to acquaint them with material culture studies. The routine work of storing, fetching and returning things in boxes and racks had its compensations. When the MAs met the researchers for whom they had to dig out objects from the collections, they might spend more time with them than the keepers did, as they supervised their every movement in the Students’ Room and took them for breaks in the Canteen. The visitors, mostly academics and including many from the collections’ source communities, rewarded the MAs with conversation about their research and comments on the objects which they could add to the collection records. Besides, preparing and packing loans to other museums often entailed travelling as couriers in Britain and around the world, with responsibility to ensure that the objects were treated and exhibited according to British Museum standards. Memorable MAs included Bob Eckett, a genial old soldier retired from the Coldstream Guards, well built and good looking, who joined the Museum of Mankind in the early 1980s to work with Mick Goddard at Burlington. He then moved to the Africa floor at Orsman Road, where he became a loyal batman to Assistant Keeper John Mack. Bob had enjoyed the army and regaled us repeatedly with his stories. I remember hearing about the obsessive Sergeant Major who arrested, court-marshalled and burned in the stove a stray newspaper found blowing around the parade ground, and Bob’s wife giving him surreptitious puffs on a cigarette while he stood guard on the route of a state parade. He was one of the old school of MAs who gained a detailed knowledge of his collection and he was a methodical collections manager, efficiently incorporating large quantities of new acquisitions and listing meticulously every-

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thing that went in and out of his custody with military precision. He sadly died after a short illness in 1991, ‘in harness’ as the Civil Service puts it. Mike Cobb, who joined in 1989 as an MA on the Asia and then Americas floor, was a man of many talents who sported jeans in bright colours and tiger stripes. Mike played the bagpipes and performed at staff parties, often in formal kilt and jacket in Scottish piping style. He was also a cartoonist, drawing shrewdly observed caricatures of his colleagues which came to adorn the walls of the Canteen and his subjects’ offices and remained apt memorials to many of the people who worked for the Museum of Mankind in the 1990s. He recalled drawing his boss Liz Carmichael to let off steam when her domineering management style, as he said, gave him high blood pressure, and was rather perplexed to find that she liked her caricature. Other cartoons parodied health and safety issues such as MAs being flattened when moving heavy objects and memorable incidents like Julie Hudson escaping from the ladies toilet after being locked in late one Friday evening. Mick Goddard in his workshop complaining about health and safety, and carpenter Andy McLeod with his dusty dungarees, bald pate and loud complaints in his distinctive Highland accent, were natural subjects for Mike’s cartoons. He even showed me practicing Irish music in my office after work, but with every kind of accordion and concertina except the one I actually played. Mike volunteered for redundancy when the British Museum was shedding staff in 2000 but later got a job in the Powell-Cotton Museum, and always kept in touch with his old colleagues from the Museum of Mankind. For all its responsibilities, Museum Assistant was actually a job with little prospect of promotion to more senior curatorial grades. As the number of young graduates applying for work increased in the 1980s, the Department tended to recruit people who were educationally overqualified and those with ambitions for a career and better pay were usually obliged eventually to seek work in other museums or take non-curatorial jobs in the British Museum and elsewhere. Even so, some who joined in the 1980s remained in the Department into the 2010s. Jill Hasell, who came to work for CDMS in 1980, became MA for

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Figure 4.2. A Mike Cobb cartoon from 1993, showing Mick Goddard and Andy McLeod discussing the building of the Paradise exhibition (see p. 115), with John Mack and Mike O’Hanlon looking on. (© Mike Cobb.)

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the Oceania floor in 1984, gaining a detailed knowledge of the collections which proved indispensable to Dorota Starzecka and her successors. Jim Hamill also stayed on from CDMS, becoming MA for North America and accompanying Liz Carmichael on her collecting trip to Mexico for her exhibition on the Day of the Dead. He moved to the Students’ Room at Burlington in 1991 and then from 2004 to its equivalent back in the British Museum, where his knowledge of the collections and registers continued to support visiting researchers and novice curators. Julie Hudson was an Egyptology graduate who joined Bob Eckett on the African floor in the late 1980s. There she was instructed by Keepers Malcolm McLeod, Nigel Barley and John Mack as she helped them research artefacts on their regular visits to Orsman Road to register collections and prepare for exhibitions and publications. Julie was one of the few MAs who did gain promotion, becoming a Research Assistant and later a senior curator and manager of a major curatorial training programme for Africa in the 2000s back at the British Museum. She and others recalled the stores as a congenial workplace, where everyone would gather for their tea and lunch breaks in the Canteen to share friendly conversation. The museum assistants were supported by masons’ assistants, an archaic term for labourers, who would shift the crates and boxes and heavy artefacts around. As several had heart conditions, they would not have been much good at shifting masonry and in practice they often served as assistant museum assistants, handling the artefacts in, around and out of the stores. In the early years there were about six of these ‘masons’, as they were usually called. They included old fashioned eastenders Bert Fry and Kenny Munns, who had several brothers working in the Heavy Gang at the British Museum, Arthur Watson from Jamaica and Matthew Charles from St Lucia. The masons had their own mess room on the ground floor, with darts and a billiard table, where dominos could be heard slammed on the table in Caribbean style during tea breaks. Matthew in particular was an expert packer who could get more objects safely into a box padded with tissue paper than anyone else, and had a remarkable visual memory enabling him to locate artefacts he had handled weeks before. He was also remembered for being able to sleep standing up, leaning unnoticed

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against a pillar until betrayed by his snores, and for crooning country and western songs which he and ‘Miss Julie’ Hudson, as he called her, would dance to on the Africa floor on a Friday afternoon. There were also several cleaners, including Dolly who acted as tea lady and looked after the Canteen and others who vacuum-cleaned each floor of the building once a week and wet-mopped them, until Conservation objected that this disturbed the humidity. There were also two ‘technicians’ based in the Carpenters’ Shop, making fixtures, fittings and crates for storing and transporting the collections, building and adapting metal racking and periodically helping to build the exhibitions at Burlington. Some continued the tradition of moving into curatorial work. David Noden joined carpenter George Griffin at Orsman Road in 1983, helped the carpenters to build exhibitions at the Museum of Mankind and then, from the early 1990s, became a museum assistant working to install the exhibits and care for the artefacts kept there and an expert on the Benin collection. One of David’s successors, Tom Haynes, who would sign his storage crates ‘Love from Tom’, left to travel the world and returned to work as a curator in the British Museum and other museums. Eventually, as the Museum of Mankind was closing down, Paul Guzie took charge of the Orsman Road Carpenters Shop, with Ian Fahy, a trained carpenter and rock musician. The other important section of Orsman Road was Conservation, specifically Organic Conservation, because Ethnography had the British Museum’s largest collections of artefacts made of perishable organic materials. At first they had one ‘workshop’ in the basement of the Museum of Mankind and another on the top floor of Orsman Road, but in 1979 both moved to a newly equipped ‘Laboratory’ in a building next to the Stores, renamed Franks House after a notable nineteenth-century curator. Longstanding conservators like John Lee maintained a close relationship with their colleagues in Ethnography, but they were now more closely managed from the Department of Conservation at the British Museum. Over the years, with newcomers professionally trained rather than learning on the job, these relationships became more distant and bureaucratic. The most senior position open to non-graduate MAs was Senior Museum Assistant, with administrative responsibilities

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for practical matters, including management of the stores. Albert Davis was in charge of Orsman Road until he retired in 1985, with a big party at Burlington at which his colleagues showed their appreciation through carefully considered gifts, presented by Trustee David Attenborough. These included a torn old deckchair for his planned move to the seaside town of Ramsgate, a two-foot diameter wall clock in lieu of a gold watch inscribed round the edge IN COMMEMORATION OF 100 YEARS SERVICE IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, and a cheese roll to remind us all of the trick I played on him years ago at the British Museum. There was also an effigy with a cigarette and a gas mask to acknowledge his smoking, a knotted handkerchief on its head for the seaside and various other symbolic attachments including a parrot on its shoulder. Albert’s deputies were John Osborn and Rod Kidman, similar old style MAs who took over from him when he became sick and succeeded him when he retired. John taught himself to deal with administration, accounts and personnel with the help of colleagues at the British Museum. After a few years, Rod’s technical training gained him promotion to the British Museum’s new building works office after the Museum was

Figure 4.3. Albert Davis at his retirement party in 1985, with the effigy celebrating his distinctive character. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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Figure 4.4. Museum Assistants Mina McElwain and Bob Eckett emptying sterilised artefacts from the fumigator in 1985. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

freed from the government Property Services Agency in 1988. This left John as effective head of Orsman Road, without formal appointment or promotion. Other senior museum assistants deferred to his experience and Dorota Starzecka became his supportive line manager as the assistant keeper responsible for the stores. Modest and soft spoken, John’s conscientious and dedicated leadership kept Orsman Road functioning through some difficult times and earned him general respect. Having joined the Department in 1966, he continued until he retired in 2009 at the age of sixty-two. His leaving party was warm and congratulatory, but being held in the Directorate at the British Museum, less amusing than that of his predecessor more than twenty years before. One of John’s responsibilities was to safeguard vulnerable organic objects against being eaten by insect pests such as clothes moths, biscuit beetles and woodworms. On the ground floor of the Stores was a large walk-in gas chamber or ‘fumigator’ that had come over from the British Museum with the Ethnography collections and was said to have been designed by the man who later built such things for Hitler. It worked on cyanide, later

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changed to ethylene oxide, and new acquisitions were routinely fumigated in it, as well as anything else found to be infested with pests. In the mid-1980s, with changes in health and safety regulations, this rather unhealthy procedure was abandoned and the pest control company Rentokil was contracted to fumigate with methylene bromide in a vacuum sealed plastic ‘bubble’ tent in the yard. Bob Eckett had the job of organising the movement of boxes of artefacts in and out of the bubble, as he had for the fumigator. Then the bubble method failed one winter when Rentokil forgot that the gas would separate out and sink when the temperature fell below about twelve degrees. They fumigated a new collection of fur garments from Canada, acquired for the Living Arctic exhibition of 1987, and a year or so later the Americas floor was found to be infested with moths, which had migrated from the Arctic racking at one end of the floor to a collection of Bolivian textiles at the other. After that, the bubble was installed over a weekend in the Students’ Room, kept out of bounds until the air had been flushed clean on the Monday. In the 1990s, fumigation was replaced by freezing, first in a walk-in refrigerator and then in more standard freezers in the yard. This moth attack also led to a new regime that John instigated to eliminate pests from the storage areas, which were always vulnerable because the building could not be sealed from intruding insects. Drione was a powder comprising a short-lived insecticide made from chrysanthemums and a long-lasting desiccant which dried insects to death. Getting this powder into all the dark corners beloved by moths was a major operation, entailing moving the bottom shelves and their boxes from the storage racking, vacuum cleaning the space, spreading the powder and then removing it where it had fallen as dust to other places, while clad in sealed overalls and masks. To avoid disrupting routine work, John organised this for weekends, four people working two days on each floor, amounting to five weekends each New Year. After a few years the overtime costs of this regime led to replacement by opportunistic applications of Drione when storage was rearranged. This was only one of the unfortunate consequences of government budget cuts during the 1990s. From employing its own cleaners, the British Museum began to hire cheaper but less

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effective private contractors. As the masons’ assistants retired one by one, the Museum also decided to abolish their posts and, without the cleaning they had done between other jobs, dirt and dust began to accumulate, with the associated risk of artefact-eating pests. Without the masons, the museum assistants’ workload increased and they suffered bad backs from lifting heavy boxes single handed. Cuts to the minibus service made Orsman Road less accessible to senior curators based at Burlington, who spent less time on their duties there. Besides, the loss of sociable conversations between the passengers led to a decline in information sharing among colleagues who did not otherwise meet day to day. At the same time, preparations to move the Ethnography collections to new storage in Bloomsbury disrupted and distracted from routine tasks. However, when these plans were abandoned, Orsman Road outlived the Museum of Mankind by many years.

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useums are expected to be repositories not only of objects but also of knowledge about anything which people imagine to be associated with their collections. The senior curators, the British Museum’s ‘keepers’, not only keep the collections but also research them through academic disciplines which, for the Museum of Mankind, were mainly anthropology and the archaeology of regions of the world designated as ‘primitive’. It had been a very long time since museums in Britain were at the forefront of this intellectual activity, having parted company with the academic anthropology of the universities when this shifted towards more theoretical studies of social structure and function from the 1920s. From then on, research in ethnography museums retreated into compiling rather dull descriptions of artefacts and technologies as ‘material culture’. Even so, as Canadian museum director Michael Ames noted in the 1980s, ethnography museums were more integrated into popular culture, more responsive to visitors and to those whose cultures they represented, and hence more ‘democratised’, than the academic anthropology of the universities, and he looked for a situation ‘where the dignity of serious scholarship combines with the nobility of public service’ (1986: 25). This was what curators were actually attempting at the Museum of Mankind when their research informed their exhibitions and publications. By the time the Museum of Mankind was winding down, the anthropologies of universities and museums were moving together again through the kind of research advocated by Ames, such as the social histories of artefacts and the role of museums in constituting the culture of their own societies and of those they represented (1986: 32–34). Although museum anthropology had to compete with the Eurocentric scholarship of art

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history, it was also coming back with more socially grounded analyses of art. In the meantime, the Museum of Mankind was one of the places where people could go to find out what the experts could tell them about exotic cultures. Anyone who wanted more information than the gallery warders or the Front Hall Information Desk could provide was directed to the Students’ Room, where they usually found a clerk behind a desk, with research assistants, at first including myself, ready to be called from more interesting work in the back room. According to Ames, we were ‘apparently responsible for screening visitors, and . . . do a marvellous job of politely discouraging enquiries’ (1986: 23). This was rather unfair, especially considering some of the people we had to deal with. Besides academic researchers and occasional museum directors, they ranged from curious visitors, school and college students and their teachers, to eccentrics and weirdos. A lot of the time we were just disappointing visitors who brought in what they hoped were interesting ‘tribal art’ objects for identification. There were a lot of export or tourist artefacts, such as Benin ‘bronzes’ recently made in Nigeria which pretended to be older and more valuable than they were but were betrayed by crude and heavy casting. We, or the keepers we called in as the experts, would try to let people down gently and say that the important thing was whether they liked them, but this did not always work. One woman who brought in a carving that Nigel Barley recalled as ‘airport art from a not very good airport’, heard his tactful explanation that it was not what she thought and immediately threw it across the room into a wastepaper bin and stormed out. If the keepers were not available we could take objects in on deposit to show them later, but we tried to avoid this for the dubious ones. Some deposits were never collected, especially if their identity proved disappointing, and they cluttered up the back room under the British Museum’s commitment to keep such things for fifty years before disposing of them. There were occasional interesting old objects, some brought for authentication by dealers or auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Other artefacts were pronounced ‘not ethnographic’, whatever that was sup-

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posed to mean. ‘Ethnography’ corresponded more or less to the contents of the early twentieth-century British Museum Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections, which still served as a picture reference to what it called ‘The instruments and utensils of savage and barbarous peoples’ (British Museum 1910: 1). On the other hand, the Students’ Room was also a place where the keepers shared their often formidable knowledge when really interesting artefacts were brought in for opinion or acquisition. The junior staff benefitted as much as the visitors when the experts explained their judgements, Liz Carmichael in particular being remembered for talking with infectious enthusiasm about Central and South America archaeology. Now and then we also met interesting, or at least surprising, people. Once while on duty on the desk I was bullied by a big scruffy elderly man with an upper-class accent and sense of entitlement, echoed by his small subservient wife, who came in and abruptly demanded information on ‘the rye bread of Homer’. He had been sent to us by someone at the British Museum who must have wanted to get rid of him but should have known better, because all I could do was refer him back there to the Greek and Roman department. This was just not good enough and after demanding to see my bosses, who proved to be unavailable, and behaving as if he was going to thump me, he eventually stomped off. He later wrote a letter of complaint about someone with long hair dressed in a denim jacket, which was fortunately so abusive that Maisie Webb, the British Museum’s Deputy Director, discounted it. Then there was the young Afro-European man with a wild mop of hair and colourful clothes who came in shadowed by a suspicious security warder, claiming to have had a revelation making him some kind of African prophet or king. This required him to give all his clothes for display in the Museum, so he started to undress. When he got down to his underpants the warder told him to stop but he gave me everything else and, as normal when visitors left things with us, I wrote out a receipt. The warder ushered him out almost naked into a cold winter’s afternoon and we later had a visit from the police, who had arrested him trying to hold a prayer meeting on the Underground. They brought the receipt to collect his clothes, demonstrating the importance of proper bureaucratic procedure.

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We did keep another such spontaneous donation, from a Polynesian man who called in at closing time one evening in 1989, very concerned to see the god A’a from his home island of Rurutu. Fortunately, this famous carving was on display and, with the sympathetic co-operation of Dorota Starzecka, he performed a chant to the god with tears in his eyes and presented it with the hat and loincloth he was wearing for the occasion, now in the Department’s collections. Some visitors to the Students’ Room were a pleasure to meet. Brian Keefe was writing a history of Cheyenne Indian inter-tribal warfare, researching the earliest colonial archives as well as published accounts from oral history and anthropology. What was unusual was that he was a plumber from Greenwich where, as he said, he had been educated for nothing more than to leave the school and go into the factory behind it. He had embarked on the Cheyenne project with no other training and although his writing could be faulted, his research was thorough and sound. I had written an MPhil thesis on Blackfoot Indian cosmology, trying to make sense of the religious world view created by hunters on the North American Plains and of the incoherent collection of anthropological theories I had learned about as an undergraduate, so I could discuss his project. We got to know each other over a few years of occasional evenings in the pub, in which I learned about the Cockney rhyming slang which was part of Brian’s own culture. He took a plumbing contract in Saudi Arabia, spending his spare time learning about the Bedouin, and I encouraged him to apply to university. He was accepted as a mature student on the anthropology course at Goldsmith’s College but became so disillusioned with its academic detachment from the human issues of interest to him that he dropped out. He was not the first person I had met from a working-class background studying anthropology, but unlike most of my student colleagues he had already developed a strong class identity and sense of purpose by learning a trade and raising a family, feeling that he had much more idea of what real life was about than his teachers. The last I heard from Brian, many years later, was in postcards he sent me from the US in which he wrote about the friends he had made while visiting Plains Indian reservations. What he confirmed to me was the potential of ordinary people

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to interest and educate themselves in the lives and culture of others, and the way academic anthropology shuts them out. Of course, not everyone wants to make an academic study of the cultures that interest them. For a time in the 1970s Peter Gibbs was a Museum Assistant working in the stores with the North American collections. He belonged to a Plains Indian re-enactment group who made their own costumes and visited the United States to learn from Native Americans and take part in powwow dance festivals. His long black hair and strong nose made him look like the stereotyped Indian and his speciality was the modern style of Fancy Dancing, with a deer hair roach, feather bustles and beaded ornaments, all of which he made himself. One of his colleagues wore a nineteenth-century style hide war shirt and eagle feather bonnet, all carefully researched from historical sources. For several years, three or four of them would dance for the Museum of Mankind Christmas party, creating a magnificent spectacle which everyone enjoyed, even if they couldn’t take it quite as seriously as the dancers did.

Figure 5.1. Peter Gibbs and a colleague displaying the results of their non-academic research in a performance at a 1970s Museum of Mankind Christmas party. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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Pete eventually moved to America in order to pursue his interests. There was no future for someone like him in the Museum of Mankind, where his knowledge and experience of Native American culture did not command the respect accorded to academic qualifications. Enthusiasts like him were popularly regarded as ‘playing at Indians’, as so many European children have done (including me). However, the fact that some Native Americans have been prepared to accept what some called the ‘Wannabee tribe’ into their communities and festivals shows the prejudice in this opinion. Besides, Wannabees are not the only ones pursuing romantic fantasies about exotic peoples which help them escape their own mundane culture, and anthropologists may be suspected of doing the same. After a century and more of colonisation, Native Americans are probably more suspicious of academics than of Wannabees, who cannot be accused of building careers from Native culture or of colluding in the collection and trade of their artefacts for enormous sums in the art markets. In Britain, re-enactors on themes such as the ancient Roman army have been recognised by archaeologists as contributing to historical knowledge through their experimental research making props for their displays and the British Museum often employed them for public demonstrations. Museum attitudes to non-academic enthusiasts such as Pete Gibbs and his Indians, and indeed to Brian Keefe and his lone research into the Cheyenne, suggest a snobbish protection of professional status, with amateur interest in the most obviously romantic of exotic cultures as perhaps a working-class alternative to anthropology. Pete proved the point when he settled on the Lakota Rosebud reservation, married a Lakota woman and became a Lakota studies teacher, living and contributing to Native American culture instead of just studying it. There were other amateur researchers who received rather more encouragement. Particularly memorable was Jeune ScottKemball, an Australian in her sixties who was studying Javanese shadow puppets and had already written an excellent booklet on the subject for the Museum (1970). Her project was to publish the whole of the puppet collection made by Stamford Raffles while governor of Java in the 1810s, which came to the British Museum in 1859, and while she was at the Museum of Mankind going through the archives she would take

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tea breaks with the junior staff. Jeune had a colourful past as one of the first female aeroplane pilots and was rumoured to have had a romantic involvement with former Keeper Adrian Digby long ago. Her striking good looks must have made her quite a beauty in her youth and she continued to impress with her stylish dress. She used lots of makeup, wore her grey hair in two long plaits wound around her head and always wore an outfit of pillbox hat, jacket, skirt, shoes and handbag in matching colour, either bright pink or purple or, after a trip to Indonesia, in a batik pattern. Her personality matched her appearance – she smoked like a chimney, swore like a trooper and said just what she thought about everyone and anyone, including the assistant keeper who she blamed for the ultimate failure of her plans to publish the Raffles collection. The Museum of Mankind supported a research based ‘ethnographic’ approach to its collections, focusing on the cultural and historical significance of artefacts rather than artistic appeal and rarity value. We declined to acquire objects looted or illegally exported from their country of origin not only for ethical reasons but also because lack of provenance and cultural context diminished their academic interest. The priority became to acquire collections of associated artefacts with detailed documentation, as produced by anthropological field research. This practice was not new, for anthropologists had been doing so since the early twentieth century and the British Museum was one of the places they could deposit their collections with the assurance they would be kept and cared for. Some of them were featured in the Museum of Mankind’s early exhibitions, as humble tools and utensils which contrasted with the prestigious art objects in other exhibitions. In 1970, James Woodburn’s collections of the sparse possessions of foragers in Tanzania of the 1950s and 1960s was exhibited as The Hadza (see Woodburn 1970), and in 1973 Hira Lal’s 1914 collection of peasant material culture as The Gonds of Central India (see Weir 1973). Bryan Cranstone’s Papua New Guinea field research of 1963 to 1964 was an important precedent for curators at the British Museum. He made a systematic collection of all aspects of portable material culture and obsolescent pre-colonial technology from a particular community, complemented with photos and film by Museum Assistant and future Conservation

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Officer John Lee, although they never published their work in the depth it deserved (see Cranstone 1966). At first it was not easy to persuade the British Museum to allow such research, let alone to fund it. Shelagh Weir, who arrived as Assistant Keeper for Asia in 1965, had difficulty getting permission for the fieldwork in Palestine and Yemen in the 1960s and 1970s that formed the basis of her curatorial achievements and exhibitions of the 1970s and 1980s. Keeper Malcolm McLeod complained that senior officials at the British Museum were ignorant and unsympathetic to this basic anthropological method, but he did manage to make field collecting official policy with the support of Trustees Edmund Leach the anthropologist and David Attenborough (McLeod 1993: 20). So, in 1976, Dorota Starzecka made a carefully documented collection on a tour of Vanuatu and Solomon Islands and in 1980 she purchased all the architectural sculptures and painted panels from a haus tambaran sanctuary in the Sepik area of Papua New Guinea. Liz Carmichael made a collection of artefacts in Ecuador in 1977 and also excavated great quantities of archaeological material. Collaboration with government and other organisations in source countries produced collections specifically for exhibitions, from Sana’a for Nomad and City and from Gujarat for Vasna. In 1984–1985, John Mack made a large collection from Madagascar on visits funded by the British Museum Society, which he presented in a major exhibition in 1986 with an imported wooden house and other reconstructed scenes. With British Museum policy still allowing fieldwork only for collecting, published research was mostly no more than general ethnographies to complement the resulting exhibitions, such as Brian Durrans’ Vasna (Durrans and Knox 1982) and John Mack’s Madagascar (1986). These were improvements on the exhibition catalogues with which the Museum of Mankind was launched, but more original and substantial studies depended on collaboration with colleagues beyond the Museum. Paul Sillitoe contributed about 200 artefacts from a community in Highland Papua New Guinea in 1979, complemented by a study of their material culture, published in a huge and detailed book, Made in Niuguini (1988). Chloe Sayer, an independent researcher into Mexican popular culture, made important col-

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lections and published books for the Museum of Mankind in collaboration with Liz Carmichael, including for the Skeleton at the Feast exhibition in 1991 (Sayer 1990, Carmichael and Sayer 1991). Having got a foothold in this academic world, I too wanted to learn about life in an exotic small society through ‘fieldwork’, the rite of passage which made an anthropologist. Unfortunately, working in education did not qualify me for official support and my argument that research experience would make me a better educator was of no avail. So I made my own arrangements, free from obligations to the Museum and its policies, applied for a grant, a research permit from the government of Solomon Islands in the Pacific, and unpaid leave from my job. I left work with my rucksack one afternoon in 1979 and a week or so later found my way to the home of Adriel Rofate’e in the forest of east Kwara’ae on Malaita island, on the other side of the world. Rofate’e had agreed to host an anthropologist but was quite surprised to see one actually arrive one evening, unannounced because my permit had not mentioned his address. That was the beginning of a project lasting thirty years and more which gave me an intellectual purpose and a personal commitment to some remarkable people, as well as enabling me to engage with the project of the Museum of Mankind as an anthropologist in my own right. Rofate’e and his family were hospitable and kind and parodied the fierce reputation of Malaita by saying I needed fattening up for eating. Writing about their culture was all I could offer in return for the information he and other community leaders entrusted to me, which was more or less what they expected. I had gone there with a particular interest in the old religion of ancestral ghosts but, finding myself in a community of evangelical Christians who attended church every day and several times on Sundays, I decided to investigate an issue which had long perplexed me. Why would Pacific Islanders abandon the religion of their ancestors for that of their colonisers, especially in an island like Malaita with a history of violent resistance to colonisation? I had read about the work of Christian missions but eventually realised that it was Malaitan evangelists who had brought about the religious transformation of their society, in response to the subversion of its spiritually based power

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structures by colonial government and business as well as missions. I also found that Malaitans were trying to reassert their ancestral traditions as kastom (from English custom), which was why Rofate’e and his colleagues wanted help from an anthropologist. So the theme of my research became ‘tradition and Christianity’, even as I realised that this academic study would be less useful to them than they hoped. Neither my colleagues at the Museum of Mankind nor my PhD supervisors had much to contribute to this research, but I received a lot of support from an international network of scholars and professionals with strong commitments to the Solomons. American Roger Keesing, who had been using his research since 1962 in neighbouring Kwaio to challenge anthropological stereotypes of Melanesian culture and introduce historical perspectives, was an important influence and early mentor. David Akin, also American, who first arrived in Malaita on the same day as myself as Keesing’s protege and eventual successor in Kwaio, has been a supportive friend for the forty years since. Many other academics have become friendly colleagues in the meantime and former British administrators and missionaries have been willing contributors to my research. All, in their different ways, were concerned for the future of Solomon Islands and its people. If academic anthropology achieves anything for the societies it studies beyond preserving cultural knowledge, it is usually by gradually percolating into the received wisdom of policy makers who affect the long-term wellbeing of people like Solomon Islanders. Formerly it trained and influenced British colonial administrators in policies like ‘indirect rule’, but now it tried to deal with ambiguous concepts of ‘development’ under indigenous national governments. By informing educated elites, from school teachers to national politicians, from metropolitan development agencies to international institutions like the United Nations, many academic researchers hoped to mitigate damaging policies founded on Western misconceptions about non-Western small societies and driven by global capitalism. One way in which anthropology could contribute was by representing these societies to the world sympathetically through analytical models contradicting the easy ethnocentric assumptions of erstwhile and neo-colonisers (including academics of

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other disciplines), but to do so it needed to be intelligible to non-anthropologists. Personally, I tried to write about the Kwara’ae as I did for the public of the Museum of Mankind, in ordinary English rather than academic jargon, and this was also a good exercise in testing the academic theory. Although anthropology seeks to contradict simplistic colonial stereotypes about non-Western culture, it can be trapped by the stereotypes of its own academic categories. When I tried to explain a society previously described in terms of ‘patrilineal’ or ‘agnatic’ or ‘cognatic’ descent, I started considering what exactly was descending, or rather what people were inheriting from which ancestors, and why – residence, family relationships, land claims, spiritual support, political allegiance and so on. The technical jargon seemed to be doing my thinking for me, providing impersonal ready-made categories which tended to prejudice an account of how and why relatives actually related to one another, obscuring this from ordinary readers and from myself. At first such academic received wisdom led me to doubt the explanations of Kwara’ae elders about local concepts such as tabu and mana, so I tested the anthropology and the patience of Rofate’e and other knowledgeable men with endless questions until I thought I understood what their culture meant to them. Such academic issues were irrelevant to the people whose knowledge and support we depended on for our data. They welcomed the books and papers I sent, but these were of more symbolic than practical use to them. What the Kwara’ae chiefs really wanted from an anthropologist was help to maintain their own culture within the social order of government, Christianity and commerce, by having their values legitimated by documentation. Codifying the rules and practices governing independent local communities to gain recognition by the colonial state was more complicated than they imagined, but publishing their culture in a form they could use, preferably in their own language, seemed a good way to return the privilege of researching with them. In a society which was becoming increasingly literate and Westernised through Christian education, this might encourage people to retain and build upon local knowledge rather than neglecting it in favour of formal schooling. I was fortunate in forming a partnership with Michael

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Kwa’ioloa, a young activist, Secretary to the Kwara’ae chiefs’ organisation and the local government, who I had met on my first visit. Michael was knowledgeable in Kwara’ae culture and articulate in explaining from his own experiences how it was changing. Together we published bilingual books on the crucial local issue of land tenure, and on forest resources and oral history (Kwa’ioloa and Burt 1997, 2001, Burt and Kwa’ioloa 2001), as well as two memoirs of Michael’s experience of changing life in Kwara’ae (Kwa’ioloa and Burt 1997, 2012). I was able to invite him to London twice, first to write up our research and then to contribute to a Melanesia research programme at the British Museum. When I began this research, the Museum of Mankind permitted rather than encouraged it (and I once received a stern warning against writing my PhD thesis in work time). It didn’t help that I was researching mainly on social and historical issues rather than collecting artefacts. Some of my senior colleagues had done the same, but mostly before they joined the Museum. When I was in the Solomons, I felt uncomfortable asking people to sell me their personal and household possessions so I came home from my first visit with a lot of photos

Figure 5.2. Our team working to document Kwara’ae culture in 1991: left to right, Rocky Tisa, my brother Michael Kwa’ioloa, myself, my father Adriel Rofate’e and Frank Ete. (Ben Burt photo.)

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and few artefacts, leading the British Museum Deputy Director Maisie Webb to question whether my fieldwork had been justified. As it had cost the British Museum nothing that was not a big problem, but I had tried to document local artefacts, particularly the valuable body ornaments which were an important part of the Museum of Mankind collections. I concluded that, in Kwara’ae at least, they had less of them than we did and that what we lacked was the knowledge they could impart about such things. In time research assistants gained more opportunities to ‘research’ instead of just ‘assist’ and Sarah Posey, as assistant to Shelagh Weir, even gained official sponsorship for PhD research in Romania, without collecting for the Museum. By the 1990s museums were at last engaging with issues around collecting from exotic societies. Curators were criticising primitivist and ahistorical exhibitions of the ‘ethnographic present’ in books like Sally Price’s Primitive Art in Civilised Places (1989). The first of the Museum of Mankind’s keepers to reflect on this seriously was Michael O’Hanlon, after collecting in the New Guinea Highlands in 1990 for his exhibition Paradise in 1993. Rather than documenting the manufacture of the artefacts, as Paul Sillitoe had done, Mike focused his research on their social history. Drawing on the local knowledge he had gained through intensive field research a decade earlier, before he joined the Museum, he focused on artefact biographies as they had mediated relationships by changing hands as gifts and payments of various kinds. His exhibition and its catalogue (O’Hanlon 1993) set these objects within the sixty-year history of colonial change and commercial development, while reflecting on the processes of collecting and representing Wahgi culture, taking account also of the Wahgi point of view. By this time, as the Museum of Mankind was preparing to close and move back to the British Museum, museums were recognising an obligation not only to collaborate with the source communities they were representing to the public, as we had done for exhibitions such as Living Arctic on Native Canadians and Skeleton at the Feast on the Mexican Day of the Dead, but also to engage them in researching our collections, for their benefit as well as ours. In a long-term gradual shift from salvaging artefacts and information that seemed doomed to disappear, a more constructive attitude was focusing on the desire

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of source communities to recover or reconstitute their cultural heritage. Dorota Starzecka researched over several years with Maori communities and New Zealand scholars to make the Museum of Mankind’s collection accessible to them through a comprehensive Maori catalogue (Starzecka et al. 2010) following an exhibition at the British Museum in 1998. A Melanesia project from 2005 to 2010 brought indigenous experts from the Pacific to research and publish the collections with the curators, as well as inviting resident Islanders to visit the Stores. In this spirit, I was able to publish a detailed catalogue of body ornaments intended to reacquaint Malaitans with their vanishing artistic heritage, better represented in museums than in most of their own island (Burt 2009). But alongside the efforts of its anthropologists to engage with social and cultural issues, the Museum of Mankind also pursued the art historical tendency to fetishise exotic artefacts as commodities sanctified as works of art. The wealth and influence of the art world seemed to seduce even keepers trained in anthropology to endorse the values of commercial collecting, particularly the intellectually bogus value of ‘authenticity’ and the emphasis on individual authorship. The criteria were different for ‘ethnography’ since, unlike Western painting and sculpture and certain elite Oriental artefacts, ‘ethnographic’ artefacts could seldom be identified as the authentic creations of individual makers as ‘artists’. Indeed, the attraction of such things depended in part on the assumption that their artistic values were the product less of individual creativity than of a generic primitive culture or mentality, as theorised by long outmoded nineteenth-century anthropology. The problem with authenticating their products was that, unlike artists, many such cultures had not died or stopped producing. Their works had become less rather than more scarce over time, especially after people realised, usually quite early on in their colonial history, that European collectors would pay good money for them. So the criteria for authenticity became ‘made for local use’, or better still ‘used’, as shown by wear and tear, and dirt or ‘patina’. Of course, makers soon learned how to have their products ‘used’ or ‘patinated’ before they sold them, but at least there was a theoretical limit to the quantity of ‘authentic primitive art’, which maintained its collection value.

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‘Made for local use’ was the criterion by which museum curators would dismiss as inauthentic artefacts such as crude new Benin ‘bronzes’ and other objects made especially for sale by people who needed money to foreign visitors who wanted exotic artefacts. This was all very well for identifying the origins and histories of artefacts, but it also governed museum collecting policy according to the criteria of the art market. If curators had been concerned to document artefact traditions as they had developed since the mythical period of authentic pre-colonial cultures, they would have acknowledged export artefacts as the products of such cultures and collected some of them too, so contributing to a better understanding of their historical development under colonialism and globalisation. The exceptions held by the Museum of Mankind only proved the rule. They included sixteenth-century ivory tableware made by Benin carvers for export to Portugal in their best estimation of European fashions; nineteenth-century Northwest Coast Native American argillite-shale carvings of Europeans and their artefacts and local artefacts such as totem poles, made for sale to mariners and tourists; and Polynesian adzes and paddles covered with intricate geometric patterns made for sale to visiting ships in the nineteenth century. All these things, being sanctified by age and scarcity, fetched high prices on the art market as (authentic) export artefacts. Indigenous minorities in the settler colonies of North America and Australasia have found a niche market by reviving obsolescent artefacts for export and the Museum of Mankind did acquire new examples of Native American basketry and Maori weaving. But more actively collected were the new styles of export artefacts regarded as ‘contemporary art’, made by named artists responding to the Western tradition of gallery art and legitimated in Western art terms as authentic expressions of cultural change. Some of these were made for local use, like Ghanaian novelty coffins in the form of cars, cameras and whatever, but most were intended for collectors and galleries, like Australian Aboriginal paintings and African gallery art. At least such things were no longer labelled with the disingenuously neutral term ‘culture contact’, like African artefacts from the 1950s which showed some kind of European influence. But where were the modern wood carvings imitating

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old masks and shrine figures, or invented to meet European expectations of ‘primitive art’, which have represented the majority of artistic production from Africa since the latter twentieth century? Being made for export by people not claiming to be artists, they may have to wait until they too are old, scarce and collectible before becoming authentic enough to be admitted to the British Museum. Another consequence of the British Museum’s fetishisation of artefacts was its neglect of the photographs it had accumulated over the years to document the societies from which the artefacts came. The Museum of Mankind did put on a number of exhibitions of other people’s photos, mostly in improvised spaces such as the Front Hall, but displayed its own photo collection only as incidental illustrations for exhibitions. Since Bryan Cranstone’s New Guinea expedition in the 1960s, its staff had made some excellent photos during fieldwork, but the Museum showed little interest in asserting ownership or storing and cataloguing them as collections. It was hardly surprising that some kept possession of their field photos even when they were technically the property of the Museum as their employer. Other photos joined the enormous collection of prints and negatives which had accumulated in the Ethnography Department from the early days of photography in the nineteenth century, when curators really were interested in acquiring images of exotic peoples from adventurous photographers and studios in the colonies. Some of this extraordinary archive was acquired as collections in albums but much was in the form of loose prints which had been stuffed into several sizes of green Civil Service box files in rough geographical order. At the Museum of Mankind, they all ended up in one of the Library basements, where they were adopted by Library Assistant Harry Persaud. Harry was from Guyana and had come to Britain in the army, seeing active service in Malaya in the 1960s and then working as a Library Assistant in the British Library. He was one of those who, without training or direction from the management, created a role for himself which the Museum of Mankind would not acknowledge that it needed. Finding time between supervising the Reading Room, fetching, carrying and shelving books, he gradually sorted through the thousands of photos,

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cajoled money from the Library budget to store them in proper sleeves, folders, purpose made boxes and cabinets, and obtained the technical training to do so according to best practice. He eventually became the unofficial curator of the Museum of Mankind Pictorial Collection. In the ‘Closed Stacks’ basement of rolling book shelves, Harry inhabited a corner cluttered with cupboards, cabinets and desks and hung with massive framed sepia photos of New Guinea from the 1880s, oil paintings of Native North Americans and various other pictures fixed to the barred windows as well as the walls. Harry had an uneasy relationship with some of his line managers, but to me he was the most helpful of colleagues, always ready to dig out obscure ancient tomes, provide useful folders, binders and stationery and share complaints about the Museum’s neglect of the Pictorial Collection. He found me the historical photos I needed to illustrate my educational publications and in time I contributed hundreds of Solomon Islands photos into his care, as original prints or copies from colonial collections obtained through contacts made in my research. What Harry had neither the time nor the expertise to do was research and catalogue the photos to the kind of standard expected for archive collections, leaving them more or less inaccessible as a public resource. The keepers, who had such expertise, continued to prioritise artefacts over historical images. They might dig out photos for their exhibitions and books from colonial expeditions, military and scientific, to Africa or the American Arctic, but they did little to help Harry catalogue them or improve their conservation and storage. Like most other ethnography museums, the Museum of Mankind was always held back by the conservative museum culture of collecting and fetishising artefacts at the expense of cultural documentation, even as it used the collections for positive and sympathetic representations of exotic cultures. But in due course, with ever easier travel and communications around the world, curators were able to respond to the desire of source communities to benefit from our collections and expertise as cultural resources. This eventually became a focus for research and collection in its own right, and a positive contribution to the idea of ‘world cultures’, espoused by the British Museum by the time the Ethnography Department moved back there.

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Figure 5.3. Harry Persaud at his desk among the archive photos and paintings in the Library Closed Stacks in 1997. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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lthough the British Museum was founded with the object of ‘satisfying the desire of the curious, as for the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons’ (Braunholtz 1970: 14), it was well behind many other museums in recognising the benefits of a dedicated education service. Then in 1974, Director Sir John Pope-Hennessey instituted an Education Office of academics and administrators to provide information for schools and other visitors. He tried to engage the curators by appointing Research Assistants for Education to each of the Antiquities departments, of which I was one. As young graduates, most of them happily complied with their departments’ indifference to education by gradually going native as academic curators, but my own post in Ethnography at the Museum of Mankind had different responsibilities and opportunities. The British Museum Education Office was half a mile from the Museum of Mankind with neither the time nor expertise to do much for visitors there. So I found myself doing more or less what it did for the British Museum and assumed the title Education Officer. The Museum of Mankind was popular with schools, once they got to know about it. Nomad and City, with its attendant World of Islam publicity, doubled annual school visitor numbers in 1976 to about 25,000 and these declined only gradually until a low point of about 13,000 in 1980. They rose again to about 18,000 in the late 1980s, fell to about 10,000 and rose again during the 1990s, boosted especially by the Africa ’95 festival to more than 20,000 before the Museum of Mankind closed in 1997. Since at first there was just me to support these school visits, I decided I could achieve more by helping the teachers than by teaching myself. For ten years or so, I oversaw the booking of school visits, wrote booklets, notes for teachers

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and worksheets for children, and held in-service training days to help teachers use the exhibitions. I had a budget for purchasing 16 mm films and videos about the kinds of people featured in our exhibitions, maintained and shown by the Education Office audiovisual technicians. With occasional donations, such as all eighteen of Granada Television’s Disappearing World series up to 1976, we built up an important collection over the years, which I programmed in public shows four days a week, with groups booking for special shows to complement their visits. On Fridays there were public lectures, which did not always attract the audiences they deserved, with the publicity rather lost in events leaflets for the British Museum as a whole. We did have our own exhibitions leaflet, which I now wrote, doing away with the Museum of Mankind subtitle, The British Museum collections of Ethnography and Primitive Art. At first the only dedicated education space in the Museum of Mankind was a Schools Room, a walled off part of the building’s original theatre, the rest of which was used for the film shows and lectures. I gradually adapted it for schools to book for their lunches, video shows and occasional teaching and training sessions for students and teachers. You could do a lot with things that the museum had rather carelessly discarded. In 1977, I began assembling a ‘handling collection’ from the so called ‘duplicates’ or surplus artefacts which the Department didn’t want but couldn’t dispose of. Some of these were actually very fine objects and a good selection of African artefacts formed the basis for teaching programmes, planned and proposed but only partly realised for want of staff. The collection was housed in stationery cupboards in the Schools Room, some new, others scrounged from around the building and fitted with many times the number of shelves they were supplied with, filched from other cupboards or cut from scrap board by the carpenters. The difficult part was finding enough of the little metal tabs required to hold up the shelves. I enlivened the dull green walls of the Schools Room by fixing up redundant blown-up photos from old exhibitions, including the almost life-sized colour photo of a chief’s court from the Asante exhibition which we squeezed through the double doors on the diagonal with barely an inch to spare. Once, I replaced all the Schools’ Room flashy but rickety tables with solid steel framed

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tables from the warders’ mess when they were thrown out to be replaced by new flashy rickety ones. I had no training in education so I learned on the job, which I saw as interpreting the presentation of other cultures by anthropology in general and our exhibitions in particular, in terms that ordinary people could understand. The academic concepts and jargon employed to describe exotic peoples seemed to make them more exotic rather than humanising them to counter the parochial racism so common in British society, as the Museum of Mankind intended. An example stuck in my mind from the commentary to a film we used to show, Trobriand Cricket, about how Pacific Islanders had adapted the game to purposes quite different from the colonial original. It went something like ‘Betel nut is an all-pervasive feature of social interaction in the Trobriands’, when it was talking about the equivalent of the British sharing cups of tea or rounds of drinks in a pub. Simplifying my own language for visitors to the Museum of Mankind required unlearning the habits of the kind of academic writing imbued by my university education. One of my first efforts, prompted by the Yoruba Religious Cults and Aborigines of Australia exhibitions, were booklets on The Yoruba and their Gods and Aborigines (both 1977). With support from the British Museum Education Office, these were published to inaugurate a smart new series, intended to be a cheap and popular alternative to the Museum of Mankind’s rather dry academic exhibition catalogues. They provided short, simple introductions to the people and places behind the exhibitions, illustrated with photos of people rather than artefacts, but without contributions from the keepers they only ran to six titles. I followed them with more modest notes for teachers on the cultural and historical background to major exhibitions, self-published as handouts with drawings, printed by the British Museum’s photolitho service. They also printed my single-page exhibition worksheets with drawings and openended questions designed to make school students think about the significance of the exhibits to the societies they came from. In those public-spirited times, before the Thatcher government began cutting museum funding, all these in-house publications were free. We took pride in providing a tax funded public service, and could afford to do so.

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My research in Solomon Islands with people of a very different way of life helped me to gain the personal and academic experience to help our public understand the cultures they viewed in the Museum of Mankind exhibitions. As real people, the lives of Solomon Islanders were less exotic and more boring and routine than you might imagine from the artefacts, books, films and exhibitions to be seen in Britain. The things that were different and interesting about them emerged at the deeper level of how they understood their world, and their relationship to our world became more relevant and interesting in view of their history of being colonised to benefit the economic development of metropolitan Britain and Australia. The ahistorical treatment of such cultures in museums appeared to be a significant problem. At the Museum of Mankind, we showed films that looked at the decline of such cultures, in particular the Disappearing World series, but these presented a rather pessimistic view of cultural obsolescence rather than the broader issues of globalisation and peoples’ adaptations to it. In the 1980s, such issues were raised at the Museum of Mankind less by my colleagues than by some of our visitors, particularly teachers who appreciated the museum as an educational resource. This was a time when global inequalities and commercial exploitation of poor countries by the rich were being addressed through ‘development education’ by bodies such as the Inner London Education Authority, Oxfam and other NGOs and associated education projects, all contesting the aggressive selfishness of global capitalism then being experienced in Britain as Thatcherism. I worked with educationists developing curriculum materials, resource centres and teaching projects and got involved in collaborations with various multicultural, anti-racist and development education programmes. I tried where I could to introduce their insights into the resources and programmes of the Museum of Mankind and contributed my Solomons research to curriculum materials published by WWF. Eventually I was joined in my education work by my colleague and friend Penny Bateman, a Canadian of about my age who had joined the Museum of Mankind in the same year as me to sort out the hoard of artefacts and documents left behind by Bill Fagg when he retired. She became one of the research

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assistants staffing the Students’ Room, doing dogsbody work for the keepers and providing information and resources for visitors until, in 1985, she was promoted to a job in the British Museum Education Office. This was now headed for the first time by an experienced educationist, John Reeve, who encouraged Penny to develop a more active teaching programme at the Museum of Mankind. She enlisted me in the project and, with the authority and resources of the British Museum to support us as well as her own enthusiasm, Penny became my first manager with any real interest in education. Being idealistic and principled but more diplomatic than I was, she was able to collaborate with the more prickly of the Museum of Mankind’s assistant keepers, who proved to be the ones most interested in developing the educational potential of their exhibitions. Penny began a regular teaching programme using the handling collection with school groups coming to see the Amazon and other exhibitions. Her first major project, for about three months in 1987, was an Arab World Activity Room in collaboration with Shelagh Weir. As Assistant Keeper for Asia, Shelagh was continuing to pursue the agenda of her Nomad and City exhibition a decade earlier, to counter popular prejudices against Arabs. Instead of an exhibition, this time a small gallery was furnished for school groups for a two-hour programme, introducing the Arab lands, demonstrating home life in a reconstructed living room, experimenting with language, writing, art and food, and role-playing hospitality to share what they had learned about Arab life and culture, past and present. Penny led the activities with Arab teachers and volunteers, as passing visitors watched with interest from the doorway. I helped her produce an Arab World Teachers’ Pack, which explained that: ‘The aim of this project is to help children understand and respect Arab customs and traditions, and teach them something about everyday life in the Arab world today. . . . to counteract misleading and sometimes negative images of Arabs common in the west’. During this time, Penny and I came across a small educational trust called Learning Through Action. In their programmes for schools and museums, one or two teachers would lead a class as characters in a historical scenario in which the students were invited to play active roles of their own. I saw them first

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at the Imperial War Museum, where a group of children were labelled up to be evacuated from London during the Second World War, only to be caught in an air raid and rushed into a bomb shelter of cardboard screens by a grocer acting as an air raid warden. He discussed with them how the war was affecting his neighbourhood and business, with the help of 1940s props and groceries. Learning Through Action’s teachers were actors who could capture the children’s imagination, and just as they would train teachers to use role play in their schools, so we hoped they might help us to develop our own programmes at the Museum of Mankind. Our first chance to try this out was with the large and impressive Living Arctic exhibition, which occupied all the main ground floor galleries for two and a half years from the end of 1987. This was initiated by Canadian First Nations chief George Erasmus and British anthropologist Hugh Brody, an advocate for indigenous land claims, who were concerned at the way that European campaigns and legislation against the fur trade were threatening the livelihood of Native communities in the Arctic. The project was taken up by Jonathan King, Assistant Keeper for North America, in an exhibition that presented a Native point of view. The Museum of Mankind had previously contributed to an art exhibition of Native American artefacts, Sacred Circles at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1975, which was criticised for exploiting Native culture. Jonathan’s Native American exhibitions at the Museum of Mankind had until then taken a similar art historical approach, so Living Arctic was an important acknowledgement of the movement to assert Native identities and civil rights that had been developing since the 1970s. The subtitle and theme of Living Arctic was Hunters of the Canadian North and it was sponsored and informed by a First Nations organisation, Indigenous Survival International (not to be confused with Survival International, although it sometimes was). Jonathan obtained funds from Canadian public bodies, national, provincial and local, and Hugh Brody provided the intellectual background to the exhibition in a Living Arctic book (Brody 1987). Brody’s research had documented the hunting and fur trapping practices of the Arctic Inuit and sub-Arctic forest Indians to demonstrate their use of the land

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as the basis of their legal claims to it, and the exhibition illustrated the changing lifestyles of Native peoples as stewards of the lands they still depended on. There were reconstructions of a Cree Indian hunting camp with canvas tipi, a Dene Indian log cabin (built by our carpenters Sid Hunter and Paul Guzie), an old style Inuit snow house cut away to show the interior, and a room in a present-day Inuit prefabricated house with all mod cons for people who still hunted seal and caribou for a living. David Erasmus later commended Living Arctic as showing best practice in the exhibition of Native American culture, at a time when the Canadian Glenbow Museum’s 1988 exhibition The Spirit Sings was being castigated by Canadian First Nations for doing the opposite. For the First Nations sponsors, the purpose of the exhibition was first of all to inform and educate the British about their contemporary lifestyle and continuing dependence on hunting on their own lands, and they sent us quantities of indigenous publications and educational materials. I produced a set of teachers’ notes and wallcharts with photos from the arctic that was published by an educational trust, but most of the

Figure 6.1. David Serkoak, the Inuk teacher for the Living Artic exhibition of 1987 to 1990 demonstrating to a school group how to harpoon a seal. (© Trustees of the British Museums.)

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education funding went on employing an Inuit teacher. David Serkoak had been brought up as a hunter, so remote from the Canadian mainstream that he was surprised at having to pay for food the first time he ate in a restaurant. Since then he had learned enough about Canadians to decide what they, and the British, needed to learn about Inuit life, and this is what he taught the many school groups who came to his classes. The Arab World Activity Room became the Arctic Activity Room, now equipped with seats of foam cubes covered with white plastic (a bit more wobbly than real snow blocks), with all the published resources and, most importantly, caribou and seal skins, Inuit costumes and equipment that the students could handle and use. Unfortunately, David did not take to our ideas of role play, so he used these resources to give more conventional demonstrations of hunting, crafts and storytelling to students who were thrilled to meet a real Inuk. He did not find it easy to live in the unfamiliar surroundings of London, even lodging with my friends who provided him with company outside work, and he found the whole experience quite stressful. Despite the success of his programme, it showed some limitations to what a native of the culture could achieve in mediating it to others in the particular context of a museum teaching programme. You need to be familiar and comfortable in the audience’s culture as well as your own. We developed the Learning Through Action approach to our satisfaction a few years later in one of the most successful of the Museum of Mankind’s education programmes, for Shelagh Weir’s next major exhibition, Palestinian Costume, which opened in 1989. Shelagh had been researching this rich but declining tradition of women’s embroidered dresses and jewellery for about twenty-five years, acquiring old collections from missionary societies and visiting Palestine for months at a time to document people’s recollections of the past and purchase more artefacts for the British Museum. The result was a beautiful exhibition in two large upstairs rooms, with curving walls to reflect the rolling hills of Palestine and costumes worn by blank faced manikins standing in the open on low plinths. These were standard old shop window dummies donated by Selfridges, whose perished foam rubber bodies were replaced by Mick Goddard with figures of polystyrene foam.

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Mick’s women were rather too voluptuous, so Helen Wolfe had to perform cosmetic surgery with an electric carving knife to fit the dresses. The women, with a few men, were backed by huge blown-up photos of Palestinian scenes, old and new, with illustrated information panels. Shelagh’s intention, beyond showing the beauty and variety of the costumes, was to demonstrate the historical identity of the Palestinian people, denied in their dispossession by the State of Israel, through the styles of dress associated with the different districts and lifestyles of their country in the pre-colonial period up to 1948. This time a dedicated Activity Room was built into the exhibition itself for the school and public programmes, as well as a corner of the gallery with seating where people could meet, talk and look at books. In raising funds to make the exhibition more elaborate than the Museum could otherwise afford, mostly from Arab individuals and institutions, Shelagh ensured that there was money for a two-year activity programme. Penny and Shelagh recruited as a teacher Sonia Nimr, a Palestinian historian from the West Bank who had been a political prisoner in Israel and was writing her PhD on the 1936 Palestinian revolt against Zionist colonisation. With this background she had, unsurprisingly, a campaigning attitude to educating British students about Palestinian culture and history. We managed to persuade her that, besides not frightening the British Museum with politics, she would be more persuasive by being less direct, like the exhibition itself. Between us we devised a role play scenario and, with some training from Learning Through Action, Sonia acted it out with conviction and enthusiasm. Each junior school class went through the exhibition and found Sonia in the Activity Room at the end, as a grandmother in an old-fashioned embroidered dress, sitting in her own home surrounded by household furnishings. She welcomed them with Arabic greetings and hospitality as visitors to Palestine and got them into conversation about how customs had changed for the worse since she was young. Describing the celebrations for her own wedding long ago, she asked the students if they would like to re-enact it, and took them to do research in the wedding section of the exhibition. Then a bride and groom were chosen and dressed in beautiful old costumes from the special teaching collection and the others were given

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Figure 6.2. Teacher Sonia Nimr as a grandmother welcoming a school group to her home in the Palestinian Costume exhibition of 1989 to 1991. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

men’s and women’s headscarves, with roles in the couple’s families. The groom arrived on a small white horse on a trolley, made by Mick Goddard, and they all celebrated with a feast of snacks and dancing. The kids enjoyed it no end, while learning how Palestinians had worn these costumes a few generations ago, had an interesting culture which had changed and, most important, were real people in the world today. The Activity Room had glazed doors so that visitors, who had demonstrated such interest in the Arab World programme, could see what was going on. Fewer secondary school students came to the exhibition, but those that did could become journalists writing articles on Palestine. Half the class was commissioned by a fashion magazine, the other by a geographical magazine, and they researched in the exhibition, interviewing Sonia as a local consultant. They produced magazine spreads of drawings, polaroid photos and text, some of which were exhibited in the Activity Room. Some of them at least seemed to grasp the intention of the programme, to demonstrate the implications of looking at the same subject from very different perspectives.

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These day to day school programmes were a great success, but most exciting of all were the public events for adults and families, brought to life by numbers of other Palestinians who joined Sonia as performers, instructors and participants. One or two came from the West Bank and Gaza as part of the sponsored programme but most were diaspora residents who arrived through contacts or from just visiting the exhibition. Among the women and men who came as embroiderers, storytellers and musicians was Reem Kelani, a young woman brought up as an exile in Kuwait and reluctantly studying biology in London. What she really wanted to do was sing and, after we met her visiting the museum one day, we brought her into the programme. She was a marvellous singer, whether of Palestinian folk songs or Western popular music, and in due course she became a professional, well known for concerts, a BBC radio series on ethnic minority music in Britain and regular performances in support of Palestinian causes. For us, she sang at some of the exhibition’s special events, such as celebrations for the Muslim festival of Eid, which turned into huge parties with Palestinian women dancing in their best embroidered dresses in the front hall of the Museum of Mankind. Palestinian Costume could have been another Amazon type scandal for the British Museum, if Shelagh, Penny and Sonia had not been so careful. As it was, Geoffrey House as head of Public Services quibbled over whether the map of Palestine should include villages destroyed by Israel since the costumes in the exhibition were made, and the Director, David Wilson, had a mention of the current Intifada removed from a caption about the new styles of dress now being worn by women on political demonstrations. To everyone’s relief, the Zionist lobby paid the exhibition barely any attention, having no complaint since references to Palestinian dispossession by Israel were implicit rather than outspoken. But, rather than feeling that the exhibition had ignored their historical predicament, the Palestinian community in Britain endorsed it as a positive statement of their culture and identity. The London representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization attended some of the celebrations, dancing with the rest, and I had to be quite rude in order to get him off the display plinths in a vain attempt to maintain our security protocols in the gallery crowded with

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excited visitors. This time, the Museum of Mankind had successfully negotiated a compromise between the conservative political instincts of the British Museum and the explicit complaints of the society it was representing. The next major exhibition we worked with was rather an anticlimax from an educational point of view. Images of Africa opened in two of the main ground floor galleries at the end of 1990, displaying the collections which the Hungarian traveller Emile Torday had made for the British Museum in the Belgian Congo in the 1900s. One problem was that Assistant Keeper John Mack who organised it wanted an art exhibition to show how Torday’s collections had surprised the British with new art styles which appealed as both decorative and naturalistic, contradicting then current preconceptions about African artefacts. Another was that the designer of the exhibition, Geoff Pickup, had a strong sense of aesthetic style but little interest in the historical and cultural context of what he was exhibiting. Between them and with assistance from Chris Spring, they produced a striking exhibition of beautiful woodcarvings, textiles and ironwork in illuminated cases standing out in rooms dimmed by dark green paint. This won Geoff a design award, but it also produced an unfortunate atmosphere of the ‘Darkest Africa’ which John had intended to challenge through the artistic revelation supposedly experienced by the European art world in the early twentieth century as a result of Torday’s collection. At the time, the British Museum’s Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections had indeed singled out the Kuba people who most impressed Torday, mentioning ‘woodcarvings exceedingly graceful in outline and covered with patterns of singular beauty’ and observing that ‘the wooden statues of their early kings are the most striking products of indigenous African art’ (British Museum 1910: 222). However, this opinion from T.A. Joyce, who co-authored books on the Kuba with Torday, did nothing to mitigate the hostile racism which pervaded the Africa section of the Handbook. Neither did Images of Africa do much to address the Darkest Africa stereotypes emanating from the Congo under the brutal Belgian regime of Torday’s time, which have lingered in popular Western culture ever since. It was left to the education programme to provide some historical context and, in the absence of funding for a teacher, we

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had various bright ideas for self-service resources. We asked for an area with seating around a table for albums of annotated photos, historical and contemporary, which had worked well as a minor feature of the Palestinian Costume exhibition, but received only a large cupboard. We used this to house three cabinets of African artefacts from our handling collection which were fixed on boards to be laid out on the floor. School groups could examine and draw the artefacts and as a prelude to each session a small back projector showed 35 mm slides of historical and contemporary images from the Congo to complement the exhibition. Volunteers facilitated the service but the sessions were run entirely by the school teachers, using written instructions and notes on the artefacts and images. All of these were provided in advance in a pack with a booklet introducing the culture of the Kuba, the colonial history of the Congo, and the issues raised by images of Africa in the exhibition and beyond. It all worked quite well as far as it went, but in the end it was an exercise in making the best of an ahistorical art exhibition in order to compensate for a missed educational opportunity. This was quite a familiar situation in the Museum of Mankind, depending mainly on the exhibition curator. By contrast, the next big exhibition, The Skeleton at the Feast, opening almost a year after Images of Africa, rivalled Palestinian Costume in its public programme. This was again organised by Penny Bateman with the support of the exhibition curator, senior Assistant Keeper for the Americas Liz Carmichael. In contrast to her Amazon exhibition, this time the public response was entirely positive. It was all about the Mexican Day of the Dead festival, showing the offerings and skeletal images with which people celebrated and commemorated their dead relatives on All Souls Day at the end of October each year. There were market stalls selling party treats and images of the dead as skeletons enacting everyday life, intricate ceramic ‘tree of life’ candelabras representing Catholic cosmology, household altars of varying styles and extravagance, and thousands of crepe paper marigold flowers which Helen Wolfe persuaded staff throughout the Department to make. Spectacular papier mâché sculptures commissioned from the celebrated Mexican popular artists Felipe and Leonardo Linares included a global

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apocalypse with the ills of the world and the four horsemen flying through the air, all as skeletons (see book cover). Besides the exhibition itself in two large upstairs galleries, the prominent mezzanine gallery became an Activity Room where the Linares and other visiting Mexican craft workers could be seen making the very things shown in the exhibition. Among them, I was impressed to meet a former wrestler who had trained Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to fight in preparation for the Cuban revolution. School groups could learn their crafts and have their work publicly exhibited. A huge red devil figure made by the Linares was hung in the stairwell of the front hall by Mick Goddard, standing in defiance of all health and safety standards on the wrong side of the first-floor balustrade with a rope around his waist held by the burly carpenter Andy Macleod. The Skeleton at the Feast owed much to guest curator Chloe Sayer, a friendly and enthusiastic researcher and writer on Mexican folk art. She not only helped Liz to collect the contemporary festival artefacts, in quantities to fill the market stalls and offering altars, but also to recruit the craft workers, and she acted as their interpreter for the public. For the schools programme, we contracted Mexicolore, a London based family of educators led by British Ian Mursell and his Mexican wife Graciella Sanchez. They were already working in schools with their own collection of children’s costumes, musical instruments, reproduction Aztec artefacts, photos and anything else Mexican you could want, based in their house in Battersea. They had their own teaching methods, adapted to the school curriculum, which drew the students into participative activities and conversations. Between them and the visiting craft workers, the Activity Room was soon festooned with school displays of papier mâché skeletons and paper cut-outs, many of them covering a large ‘tree of life’ on one wall, and a household offering altar for Graciella’s own family and their departed relatives. For the school holidays, and especially around the Day of the Dead itself, there were family activities with Mexican musicians and food, supported by Mexico Amigos, a club for expatriate Mexicans. As with Palestinian Costume, the active participation of those who wanted to celebrate their own culture brought the exhibition to life for everyone else.

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Figure 6.3. The Day of the Dead Activity Room in 1992, with the Mexicolore family altar and school students’ work on the wall, and one of the Linares brothers working on a papier mâché dragon. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

By the time The Skeleton at the Feast closed in November 1993, I was working with another exhibition, closer to my personal interest in the Pacific and development issues. Paradise: Change and Continuity in the New Guinea Highlands opened that July, based on field research among the Wahgi people by Assistant Keeper Michael O’Hanlon. It was set in the room designed for Shelagh Weir’s Palestinian Costume exhibition, with the curving walls repainted with stylised views of tropical mountains. Like Shelagh, Mike was a good enough anthropologist to recognise the importance of engaging with the changing circumstances of the people he studied, for academic reasons if not from the kind of political issues raised by Palestinians or Amazonians. Change and continuity was not an original theme, but a presentation of cash cropping of coffee to purchase manufactured imports and fund pig feasts in a country where the first colonial intrusions were still remembered from the 1930s was certainly new for the British Museum. It set the bird of paradise plumes and paint of popular imagination, the focus

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of Mike’s original research into body adornment, in the context of the contemporary world. This was diminished only by the absence of the plumes themselves due to export prohibitions, and of the pigs. Mick Goddard had to make a trussed-up polystyrene pig and construct a pig feast shrine with numbers of jawbones modelled on the bones from a pig’s head which he boiled up in his workshop until it stank out the whole basement. Full-size colour photos compensated for the omission of actual plumes and paint and historic photos from the colonial expeditions of the 1930s gave the exhibition historical depth. What Mike did collect, which others usually ignored, were manufactured goods stocked by the exhibition’s corrugated iron trade store as part of Wahgi everyday life. There were local brands of tea, biscuits and beer, or at least beer bottles, complementing the war shields of steel sheet painted with macho slogans referring to beer drinking and fighting. For me, this was the best opportunity yet to introduce the themes of development education into an education programme based on the role play approach of Learning Through Action. I produced a teachers’ pack for the secondary geography curriculum, introducing the unfamiliar culture and colonial history of the Papua New Guinea Highlands. This included a set of fictional autobiographies representing some key roles in the issues affecting Wahgi society – local men and women faced with various social and economic issues and outsiders mediating with the wider world, with portraits including an anthropologist who looked a bit like Michael O’Hanlon. These were advised by Learning Through Action to serve as case studies for school projects, as well as for a role play programme which they ran at the Museum of Mankind. Next door to the exhibition, what had been the second gallery of Palestinian Costume with its useful plinths, was now the Activity Room, with its own former Activity Room full of cabinets holding the handling collection. This now included kina pearlshell valuables, string bilum bags and store goods generously donated by a trader in the New Guinea Highlands. Unfortunately, the prescriptive nature of the National Curriculum of the time discouraged teachers from taking up a class project about a country which was only permitted rather than specified under the rules. We had one school that brought all

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the classes of one year group and this proved that the role play programme worked well, even if it may not have justified the time and energy we spent developing it. That lesson learned, the next role play project was aimed at a small conventional exhibition which was actually mounted in response to the curriculum. For some reason, probably because the curriculum writers needed an African civilisation case study and had heard of no others (Egypt being ineligible, of course), Key Stage Two History recommended ‘Benin’. Even then there were teachers who wasted months of preparation trying to find resources for Dahomey, the country unfortunately renamed Benin in 1975. But, with our marvellous collections from Benin in Nigeria, the Assistant Keeper for West Africa Nigel Barley was persuaded to stage Great Benin: A West African Kingdom in a modest ground floor gallery, which ran for four years from the end of 1993 to 1997. It was not very historical, did not employ any of the reconstructions of Bill Fagg’s 1970 exhibition and took a timid approach to the British conquest and looting of 1897. Nigel ignored recommendations from a consultation exercise we held with teachers but even so it was an exhibition schools wanted to see for their only opportunity to study African history. This time we worked with a West African educational trust, Heritage Ceramics, which was led by the charming and energetic Tony Ogogo, himself from Benin city. Their name came from Tony’s ceramic studies at Chelsea College of Art, which he developed further by learning the local technology practiced by women potters at home and then adapting it into a basic method for teaching British children how to make coiled pots and Benin style masks. With a team from Nigeria and Ghana, Heritage Ceramics offered programmes for schools including pottery, tie dying, drumming and dancing and West African costume. Tony had also contributed to an excellent curriculum pack, researched in Benin and published by WWF for its conservation and development education programme (Midwinter 1994). This provided everything needed to teach not only the history of Benin but also the contemporary way of life that had developed from it. We engaged Heritage Ceramics to run a Benin Village programme, based in the Activity Room, already adapted from the Palestinian Costume gallery. Mick

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and the carpenters built us a West African iron roofed house front on one of the plinths, which was furnished with pots, firewood, yams and plantains, paraffin lamps and other objects more familiar in an African household than a British one. With the African teachers, we devised a full day programme in which a school class was welcomed by a village elder to his home, introduced through conversation to the basics of West African rural life, learned about Benin by research in the exhibition, and practiced pottery or tie dying or music. Finally, the students went back to the village in role to take part in a festival, in costume, as chief and elders, food providers, musicians, masqueraders and dancers. It was a long and busy day for eleven to twelve year olds, but it worked. It absorbed and excited them and some wrote letters back to the Heritage team, often with drawings, saying things like they wished they lived in Africa because it was such fun. In a country where Africa was so often portrayed through scenes of disaster and destitution, where African origins could still attract racist victimisation, we regarded this as a triumph for our programme.

Figure 6.4. Kojo Darko of Heritage Ceramics helping school students into roles as a king and retainers for the Benin Village programme in 1997. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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There were a lot of African exhibitions and programmes at the Museum of Mankind in the mid-1990s, encouraged by the arts festival Africa ’95. This developed out of plans by the Royal Academy to stage a primitivist exhibition spectacle, Africa: The Art of a Continent, which annoyed Africanist art historians by excluding ‘contemporary art’. Some of the objectors organised exhibitions of gallery art and performance, mostly in London, celebrating African participation in the Western art world. The Museum of Mankind now became entirely African for a time, with its large conventional African exhibitions Smashing Pots and The Power of the Hand, smaller ones of textiles, and gallery art exhibitions of which the most spectacular was Play and Display (1995–1996) with Sokari Douglas Camp’s steel figures of Nigerian masquerades. The RA exhibition got the most public attention but the festival encouraged us to further develop our African education programmes. Heritage Ceramics and other West African educators ran African Village workshops for schools, as well as public workshops on weekends and holidays for children and adults on pottery in the Smashing Pots exhibition, with textile dying, music and dance in the Schools Room. Tony Ogogo and his colleagues could teach anyone to make a coiled pot or Benin mask by following his simple well-designed procedures, to dye cloth in tie and resist patterns, and perform drum rhythms. We found Sam Makinde, a teacher in Stevenage from a Yoruba dyeing family, who demonstrated how to work with indigo, and a Ghanaian storyteller in London, Amoafi Kwapong, to entertain children with African tales. These were British Africans sharing their culture and helping predominantly White school children to appreciate it. Besides continuing to present non-Western culture under the current popular agenda of development education and antiracism, Africa ’95 provided an opportunity to address some issues around African art. Both the Royal Academy’s primitive art approach and the gallery art reaction which complemented each other in the festival were at odds with the ethnographic tradition of the Museum of Mankind, but our curators also tried to validate African culture by treating it as ‘art’ in the terms of the Western art world. For this audience, historical and cultural context served to authenticate the artefacts as worthy of

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aesthetic appreciation and ultimately of commercial value but did little to inform people about Africa. Nor did ‘African art’ challenge the Western colonial concepts which had consigned some of the continent’s cultures to ‘Ethnography’ and others to the British Museum’s antiquity departments, while ignoring yet others altogether. Where in our ‘Africa’ were the ancient Egyptians and Mediterraneans, the Asian and European immigrants and the emigrants to America and Europe exported under the slave trade? I published a booklet called What is African Art? which questioned both the application of Western ideas of art to African culture and the focus on Black Africa to the exclusion of others within Africa and its diaspora. It seemed to go down well with the teachers it was aimed at and, although it made little impression within the British Museum, I later heard that it was used in schools in Botswana. Complementing these programmes were other school holiday events, such as mancala playing for an exhibition of African game boards in 1997 and Javanese music workshops with the South Bank Gamelan in 1999. From 1996, we also hosted the schools programme for the annual Music Village festival organised by the educational charity Cultural Co-operation, with performances in the Theatre and Activity Room, from South African gumboot dancers to Sufi whirling dervishes. During the 1990s the Activity Room, with its handling collection based in the back room, became an important educational resource, as testified by pinboards displaying drawings and appreciative letters from visiting school students. It also provided storage space, behind the false walls, for old exhibition panels and scrap materials which might come in handy, unfortunately obstructing the radiators and making the room unpleasantly cold in winter. The room was also a good venue for staff events and it was here in 1994 that Paul Guzie and I staged a party celebrating our twenty years at the Museum of Mankind. The wife of carpenter Andy MacLeod baked a cake for us, iced with black prison bars and the inscription ’20 years hard labour’ and adorned with a ball and chain. Here too we held the leaving party for Mick Goddard in 1995, when he retired at the age of sixty after more than thirty years (of not too hard labour). He was going to spend more time on his boat, a rusty iron barge sitting on the mud of a tidal inlet at Felixstowe,

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which he had spent the last few years making watertight with experimental mixes of concrete and glue devised and tested in his workshop in the Museum of Mankind basement. As before, David Attenborough cheerfully agreed to make our presentations to Mick, which included a large box of scrap metal suitable for making his junk sculptures. These were the last years of the Museum of Mankind and Mick’s departure signalled the end of the old order. The education programmes facilitated by the Activity Room came to an end as the Museum of Mankind closed to the public in 1997 and Ethno prepared to be swallowed up by the British Museum at Bloomsbury.

SEVEN

BACK TO THE BRITISH MUSEUM We had always known that the British Museum planned

to move Ethnography from the Museum of Mankind back to Bloomsbury one day, when the British Library had been relocated to make space. No one at the Museum of Mankind much liked the prospect, but we had plenty of time to get used to it as it took ten years from the time our first British Museum gallery opened until our offices finally left Burlington. Like our public, we thought the Museum of Mankind was doing a good job of representing minority cultures in a reasonably sized museum with its own distinctive identity and we were afraid of being overwhelmed by the huge, stuffy, antiquarian British Museum. Ever since the Museum of Mankind closed, erstwhile visitors have told me what a good museum it was, especially remembering the reconstructions of the contextual exhibitions. But on reflection, I came round to the opinion that the British Museum really was where we should be, in order to show that cultures ignored by Eurocentric and Orientalist scholarship were intrinsic to the global vision of world cultures that the British Museum now professed. Ethnography had been expelled in 1970 as marginal to the British Museum’s vision of human history and at last this prejudice might be redressed. Perhaps the culture of the Museum of Mankind, with its contextualised exhibitions, awareness of contemporary issues and interactive public programmes, could invigorate and transform the British Museum. Unfortunately, this ideal underestimated the complications of the major reorganisation that the British Museum was undergoing at the time and overestimated the ability of the Ethnography Department to challenge its conservative culture. It didn’t help that the British Library could not provide a clear schedule for when it was going to vacate which areas of the

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building, but nor was there any clear vision, within the Department or beyond, of what Ethnography might do with the space. After Malcolm McLeod left to become director of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow in 1991, John Mack was promoted to succeed him as Keeper of Ethnography and it fell to him to oversee the drawn out process of our return to the British Museum. Sad to say, this became a series of missed opportunities and disappointments. With money short due to reductions in government funding and the costs of reorganisation, our new galleries at the British Museum were planned opportunistically on the basis of available sponsorship. Thanks to a visit from the President of Mexico, the first new permanent gallery, planned in the early 1990s and opening in late 1994, was named for that country. We had outstanding central American collections, acquired from the 1820s onwards through British attempts to claim ownership of the culture of the Aztecs, Maya and their predecessors by prospecting their archaeological sites in support of the political and commercial interests of their ‘informal empire’ in the region (Aguirre 2005). The British Museum later undertook its own archaeological research and also acquired post-colonial artefacts, such as Hispanic silverware, textiles from indigenous peasant peoples, and the Day of the Dead artefacts exhibited in The Skeleton at the Feast. As a result, we had material to explore the cultural history of central America from the earliest times through European colonisation to the present. But the British Museum could provide only a small room and in return for the sponsorship it allowed the Mexican government to set the agenda for the gallery. It has been pointed out that the Mexican governing elite, with its Spanish colonial heritage, had long sought to legitimate its claim to the country by appropriating as symbols of national identity the history and antiquities of the civilisations its forebears destroyed (Errington 1998, chapter 6). Mexican museums celebrate the cultures of the Aztecs and their neighbours as precursors to the mestizo colonial state, while marginalising their contemporary indigenous heirs as exotic peasants, divorced from this history. Since the British Museum’s collections were acquired in the spirit of contesting this agenda in the nineteenth century, it was rather ironic to see it supporting it

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in the twentieth, in a ‘Mexico’ gallery that excluded the rest of central America and anything after the Spanish conquest. The gallery’s curator, Colin McEwan, was an experienced archaeologist who did a masterly job of explaining the succession of ancient cultures represented by the British Museum’s collections from different parts of Mexico. However, he was constrained by the terms of the sponsorship and his work was framed by an extravagant and pretentious refit of a small gallery. An architect was engaged to devise a pyramidal stone plinth for the monumental sculpture and a ceiling of black slate to mimic a corbelled Maya temple interior, all at great and unnecessary expense. If the Ethnography Department had any discretion over the terms of the Mexican sponsorship, there was little to show for it. The Museum of Mankind closed to the public at the end of 1997, with a lively four-day West African festival during the Christmas holiday, led by some of the people who had worked with our education programmes. Most of us continued working there behind closed doors in a building now eerily quiet, but John Mack was promoted to Senior Keeper in the British Museum, with an office in Bloomsbury, so his Deputy Keeper Brian Durrans took over the running of the Department. The contents of the building were gradually cleared with characteristic British Museum carelessness. The display cases were dismantled to be scrapped, rather than making any attempt to have this flexible and effective exhibition system reused at the British Museum, or anywhere else. The carpenters did manage to sell off a lot of the expensive aluminium posts and beams for scrap, earning some cash for the Department rather than for the clearance contractors, and they stored away the wooden boards for reuse, but the plate glass and most of the other fittings were just dumped. Some of us kept a few bits and pieces for making things at home and I built a lean-to from aluminium posts and tables from teak worktops in the basement workshops. It was all rather sad, not least because of the waste witnessed by those of us who had always reused and recycled things to save the Department’s limited resources. In the meantime, while waiting for more new gallery space at the British Museum, Ethnography had been trying to establish a presence there through a series of temporary exhibitions, with

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Museum Assistant David Noden spending most of his time installing them for the various curators. From 1996, there was a so-called ‘Ethnography Showcase’ on the first floor landing of the front stairway, also funded by sponsorship, this time from the oil company BP. It opened with Mexican Textiles and went on to Central Asian Nomad Felts and South African Beadwork. Our larger exhibitions were proving remarkably popular, as visitors to the British Museum encountered unexpected new cultures. Ife, showing the naturalistic brass sculptures from ancient Nigeria, had more visitors than the Michelangelo sketches showing at the same time. There were also major exhibitions like those at the Museum of Mankind, with educational and public programmes. The first of these, in 1998, was Maori, which continued the Museum of Mankind’s practice of collaboration with the source communities of its collections. Dorota Starzecka visited New Zealand twice in the 1990s to collect contemporary artefacts from Maori makers and consult with scholars, two of whom came to London to work with her on the exhibition. Maoris were also represented by residents in Britain, who blessed the artefacts and opened the exhibition. This was to be a ‘dawn ceremony’ at the front of the British Museum but, dawn in June being rather early for the Museum’s residential neighbours, it was held some hours later in the Front Hall, with the required ‘feast’ as breakfast in the staff canteen. The exhibition hosted visiting Maori artists and the London Maori Club of resident and visiting New Zealanders, Te Ngati Ranana, gave impressive performances of singing and dancing in the Great Court. This was Dorota’s last exhibition before she retired the following year, but she honoured a commitment to the Maoris by publishing the whole of the British Museum’s huge Maori collection in a catalogue ten years later, co-authored with her collaborators on the exhibition (Starzecka, Neich and Pendergrast 2010). The new permanent galleries were less intelligent and imaginative than some of the temporary exhibitions. Having followed a Mexican colonial approach for one gallery, the British Museum went on to reproduce a North American one for the next, presenting Native subject peoples in a timeless pre-colonial past rather than in the present (also critiqued by Errington 1998,

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chapter 6). Of course, such colonial perspectives were just as pervasive in Britain and the agenda for the new North America gallery was driven more by its curator, Assistant Keeper Jonathan King, than by its sponsor, the Chase Manhattan Bank. The gallery opened in 1999, with wall-cases divided according to a version of the culture areas identified by anthropologists at the conclusion of colonial conquest about a century before, under the disingenuous title First Peoples, First Contacts. The obvious problem with this agenda was that, unlike Mexico where ‘contact’ transformed the region by conquest in a generation or so, the process of colonial subjugation to the north took four to five hundred years. During this period, culture areas in the east were obliterated before others had even been formed as a result of the displacement and transformation of Native societies to the west. Signs of these historical processes in the artefacts on display were barely acknowledged, although all but a few of them showed clear evidence of colonial influence in materials, technologies and styles. Far from ‘first contact’, many were produced on colonial reservations, while a century and more of reservation life was represented explicitly only by some revived contemporary crafts and Native ventures into the global art market. As with ‘Mexico’, there was nothing to indicate the course and consequences of Native adaptation to the colonial and global world in which they still lived. The two galleries were a sorry retreat into antiquarianism from the contemporary relevance of the Mexican Skeleton at the Feast and the Canadian Living Arctic exhibitions at the Museum of Mankind. Of course, all this was happening during the biggest upheaval the British Museum had experienced since the natural history collections moved out in the nineteenth century. The refurbished Great Court, completed just in time to fulfil its role as a Millennium Project late in 2000, had cleared all the British Library’s infill buildings from the central courtyard, leaving only the Round Reading Room, minus its concentric bookstacks. This produced a magnificent plaza, roofed with triangular glass panes and enclosed by the restored neoclassical walls, plus some cruder stonework around the Reading Room reflecting the modernist fashion of the architects Fosters. When this transformation of the British Museum was planned, the Direc-

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tor David Wilson had expected the additional space to allow for ‘temporary exhibitions of the high standard uniquely achieved at the Museum of Mankind’ (Wilson 1989: 125) but this never happened. The flexibility of the Museum of Mankind’s exhibition programme was lost when the adjustable case system was scrapped, to be replaced in the British Museum Ethnography galleries by maximum size built-in wall cases that allowed only for changing exhibits within permanent exhibitions. The last of Ethnography’s exhibitions to reflect the contextual approach of the Museum of Mankind was in the British Museum’s new temporary exhibition gallery on the first floor behind the Reading Room. Unknown Amazon in 2001 was curated by Colin McEwan in collaboration with Brazilian researchers and museums to show the indigenous culture of the region and its archaeological antecedents. An imaginative design with audiovisual effects to convey the atmosphere of the rainforest and its serpentine rivers was the setting for artefacts from jewel-like feather ornaments to stone sculptures, huge painted urns and ancient funeral effigies half buried in a cave. The exhibition was accompanied by a large illustrated volume by leading scholars on the archaeology, history and ethnography of Amazonia, drawing attention to the relevance of past indigenous experience for the present and future of the region. Colin also worked with an indigenous organisation to bring over two craft workers who demonstrated basket plaiting and other skills while explaining their culture through interpreters, seated prominently at the foot of the Great Court staircase. In a welcome contrast to Hidden Peoples of the Amazon at the Museum of Mankind, I was able to organise a very successful public seminar or ‘Study Day’ with Survival International on The Amazon: Past, Present and Future. This began several years of collaboration with them for study days on the themes of Pacific Islanders in the 21st Century and Africa’s HunterGatherers: Past, Present and Future. During this time we were also busy with plans for a grand new project, to move our stored collections and public services to a new site, a large redundant Post Office building two blocks south of the British Museum. It was an ugly 1960s building but had plenty of space for the Ethnography collections from Orsman Road as well as British Museum collections from other

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outstations, and it was five minutes’ walk from the front of the British Museum instead of the best part of an hour by bus. The British Museum purchased the building with trust funds and a government grant was offered to fit it out as a museum store under the then fashionable Private Funding Initiative (PFI). This was the government’s way of inviting private investment in public infrastructure projects in order to defer its current expenditure, at the price of lucrative rents and fees paid to the investors in future years. In this case, three major property companies were to adapt the building, turning part of it into a hotel (rumoured to include a swimming pool in the basement). A grant was obtained from the Heritage Lottery Fund to provide for increased public access to the British Museum collections, so it was planned as a ‘Study Centre’ with visible storage and much improved research and education facilities. It was to include a ‘Textile Centre’, funded by a grant from the Clothworkers’ Guild, to provide the special facilities which our huge textile collections deserved. From 1995, much time and energy, hope and imagination was devoted to planning a building which might resolve the problems of our inadequate storage and limited public facilities. As head of the Stores, John Osborn had to advise the companies contracted to furnish the new building with storage fittings, workshops, freezers, research and library facilities and so on. They took him around the country to inspect the ultra-modern facilities and mechanised storage systems they had installed in other museums, much of it beyond the means or needs of the British Museum. Helen Wolfe likewise researched the most advanced storage practices for the Textile Centre on visits to museums in America. Education staff like myself planned how to continue the Museum of Mankind’s interactive and hands on programmes, public events, workshops and educational resources in the new building and to integrate them better with the research and library services. In preparation for moving the collections, extra staff were employed to pack every box of artefacts at Orsman Road with tissue paper so that they could be transported safely to their new home. Only the Africa curators, sceptical that the move would actually happen, decided instead to use the extra resources to deal with their backlog of unregistered acquisitions. The textile collections were taken to

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now empty galleries in the Museum of Mankind to be rolled or folded and packed to the best conservation standards. Then, in 2003, the whole project was cancelled. We never learned exactly what happened but it seems that the projected staffing costs proved unaffordable and the PFI deal failed to materialise. Maybe the project was unrealistically overblown by the expectations of the Heritage Lottery Fund, and of course it coincided with the expense of building the Great Court. Hardly anything was salvaged from the debacle. Rather than refurbish the Post Office building more modestly and gradually as a store, the British Museum sold it. The now well-stored textile collection was moved to an outstation in Blythe House near Olympia where Helen Wolfe, who had spent the previous seven years planning the new Textile Centre, managed to create a modest version of it without the Clothworkers grant, which was returned unspent. Other collections stored in the high security strongrooms at the Museum of Mankind, including the Benin brass and ivory sculptures, were moved to equivalent storage at the British Museum. At Orsman Road John Osborn, faced with the prospect of the collections remaining in a building so overstocked that boxes were obstructing the aisles in breach of fire regulations, persuaded the management to install moveable ‘roller racking’ which could close the aisles and increase the amount of shelving. He also had the redundant fumigator removed to provide extra storage space on the ground floor for large objects. Otherwise, everything stayed where it was, the three-quarters of the collections that was now packed and sealed for the move to be gradually unpacked as people needed access to them in the years that followed. Senior management, from the Directorate to the Ethnography Department, declined to consider new educational facilities at the British Museum that might compensate for the Study Centre, or even for those of the Museum of Mankind. The abandonment of the Study Centre was a big disappointment and a blow to morale throughout the British Museum, but especially in Ethnography. The next stage in Ethnography’s move back to the British Museum was the large gallery for Africa, in space provided as part of Foster’s contract in the basement below the north end of the Great Court. The gallery was planned collaboratively by

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all four of the senior African curators, who felt that it was time to move on from the contextual exhibitions of the Museum of Mankind. In order to raise the profile of Africa in the British Museum, they took an art historical rather than an ethnographic approach, which suited the gallery’s sponsors, the wealthy Sainsbury supermarket family, who were ‘primitive art’ collectors as well as famous patrons of the arts. The curators did refuse the Sainsburys’ repeated requests to focus the gallery on iconic African art treasures such as the famous brass head from ancient Ife in Nigeria and decided instead that visitors should encounter first of all some contemporary gallery art from Africa. Most striking was Sokari Douglas Camp’s steel masquerade sculptures, as shown at the Museum of Mankind for Africa ’95, and the rest of the gallery also repeated features of the Museum of Mankind exhibitions from that time. There was Chris Spring’s arms and armour and textiles, Nigel Barley’s pottery and Benin sculpture, and new sections on masks and wood carvings from John Mack. Julie Hudson contributed to these sections as well as managing the fitting out of the gal-

Figure 7.1. The Sainsbury African Galleries, opened in 2001, with glass cases of artefacts leading to a selection of Benin brass plaques at the back. (© Trustees of the British Museum.)

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lery and persuading the British Museum Design Office to allow large open display areas for pottery, masks and Benin plaques. The result was a mixed assemblage based variously on technologies, functions, local cultures and art world fashions, with huge glass wall-cases designed by Geoff Pickup, adept at making things look beautiful under spotlights. The underlying theme of the gallery was the curators’ desire to give prestige to African culture and to the British Museum’s collections by presenting artefacts as ‘art’ in the Western terms of the international art world. In abandoning the contextual exhibition approach of the Museum of Mankind for a formalist art approach, they gave up the difficult anthropological task of promoting an understanding of other cultural values in favour of the simpler expedient of assimilating African culture to Western values. This path was well trodden by the art world in its continually expanding definitions of collectible art to commodify new kinds of artefacts as objects of admiration, prestigious possessions and investments. It had influential precedents in the aesthetic approach of Bill Fagg, in the primitive art museums of America and France and, of course, in support from wealthy patrons of the arts such as the Sainsburys, who had already sponsored a primitive art type museum in the University of East Anglia. When it opened as the Sainsbury African Galleries in 2001, the gallery marked a deliberate shift towards the art museum model, reflected in an introductory panel noting the Sainsbury family’s admiration for the artist Henry Moore and the inspiration he had taken from African sculpture. Chris Spring took a leading role in the gallery as an artist and specialist in African gallery art, intending to challenge stereotypes of Africa and African art through an art historical approach which seemed to me to do exactly the opposite (Spring 2015: 35). Contradictions with the ethnographic emphasis on cultural context in previous exhibitions at the Museum of Mankind were recognised by the curators but not addressed. In the book published to accompany the new gallery, John Mack also took an art historical approach that began with artefacts of interest and then used the ethnography to explain their original significance, often in response to European preconceptions and queries. He wrote in justification of the inclusion of ‘con-

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temporary art’ that ‘there is no such thing as an “ethnographic” object, merely objects regarded ethnographically’. Then, rather than treating these objects ethnographically in the context of Western cultural hegemony which had led Africans to participate in the Western art world, he proceeded to regard them art historically, as ‘reflections on “tradition”’ by African artists (Mack 2000: 24–25, 125–215). Such was the character of the Sainsbury African Galleries. An alternative had only recently been tried by the south London Horniman Museum’s African Worlds gallery, which opened in 1999, curated by our former colleague at the Museum of Mankind, Tony Shelton. This was also thematic rather than geographical in organisation, but the themes were social and cultural rather than artistic and technological. Colonial stereotypes of Africa were challenged by including both ancient Egypt and the diaspora, avoiding classification by ethnic groups and art styles, noting the colonial history of the artefacts, and including commentaries by African Londoners (Shelton 2003). Even to an art critic, Jonathan Jones of The Guardian, the Horniman gallery ‘puts the British Museum’s Africa gallery to shame. It’s more visual, more aesthetically responsive to continent and diaspora, art and social life, past and present’ ( Jones 2009). As Education Officer, I was able to comment on the Africa gallery plans at an early stage. Reflecting on the Africa ’95 festival, I thought that this might be an opportunity to challenge the primitivist stereotypes perpetuated by the Royal Academy exhibition of 1995. Colleagues in the Education Department drew my attention to the many African connections exhibited throughout the British Museum that might be used to present a historical view of the continent and its place in the world. A gallery with references to Africa in other departments could complement and contextualise the African collections of Ethnography. Chris Spring’s response to my suggestions was that the education programme could deal with all this, so with the support of the Education Department under John Reeve I produced a teachers’ booklet. Africa in the British Museum (2001) summarised African history using current British Museum exhibits from ancient Egypt, the ancient Mediterranean, the Islamic conquests, Indian Ocean trade, Atlantic slavery

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and diaspora, European colonisation and then independence. I had to find a few illustrations from other sources to illustrate the slave trade, made my own photos of African and Caribbean Londoners and an African art dealer, and the Horniman’s African Worlds gallery provided a photo of an Afro-Caribbean shrine. For another perspective on ‘Africa in the British Museum’ I included photos of staff with African connections, from a Nigerian cleaner and an Afro-Caribbean clerk to a White South African senior curator and Chris himself, to illustrate the African connections of British society (revealing implicitly the coincidence of race and class in the British Museum hierarchy). A glossy version of the booklet (Burt 2005) was published by British Museum Press in time for the tenth anniversary of Africa ’95, which was celebrated with another more modest festival. After the Director Neil MacGregor noticed that the booklet mentioned Western museum collections as including colonial loot, he had it withdrawn from sale in the British Museum bookshop, although it continued to be displayed in the front window of a bookshop opposite the Museum. There were evidently limits to MacGregor’s policy of opening up debate on historical issues, which had impressed many of us when he proclaimed it on his arrival. Another education project to complement the Africa gallery was a series of ‘Celebrating Africa’ weekends, from 2002 to 2005. These were the British Museum’s contribution to Black History Month, an American initiative taken up by many British schools each October. We were able to bring in cultural and community organisations to promote the African presence in Britain thanks to Bala Sanusi, a cultural broker from northern Nigeria who offered his services to the British Museum. For several years, Bala raised funding from commercial sponsors, invited participants and booked performers and presenters, most prominent of whom was the famous musician and antiapartheid activist Hugh Masakela. My role was to manage it all through the complicated bureaucracy of the British Museum, getting approvals, organising the venue and programme and arranging the furniture. We had stalls all around the Great Court displaying, demonstrating and selling the work of African and Afro-Caribbean individuals and organisations, from national tourist boards to educators and artists. There was a stage area

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for music and dance performances which Bala booked, including some lead acts from Africa to complement a range of British African groups. As part of the programme, Tony Ogogo and his Heritage Ceramics team did drumming workshops and there were impressive groups like the London East African Gospel Choir of young people who danced and sang in artificial leopard skin one year and Ugandan barkcloth the next. Crowds of people turned up and thoroughly enjoyed themselves, as well as a few who complained about the noise. They had a point, as the acoustics were atrocious, with the music rattling around into an incoherent din on the far side of the Great Court, made worse by high-volume amplification systems employed by many of the performers. An Ethiopian restaurant stall caused health and safety objections by giving away delicious food and a visitor complained about the presence of the High Commissioner for Zimbabwe, who had received the same invitation as all the other African high commissions and embassies. But these weekends did raise the profile of Africa in the British Museum, bringing in Africans and their living culture to complement the arty approach of the Sainsbury African Galleries.

Figure 7.2. Celebrating Africa in 2003, with dancers performing in the British Museum Great Court. (Ben Burt photo.)

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For all the success of such public activity programmes, the interactive school sessions pioneered at the Museum of Mankind never became established at the British Museum. The teachers of the Education Department did embrace the new possibilities of the Ethnography collections and my task became helping them deal with subjects familiar to me but new to them, such as Africa and Native North America. However, the departmental structures of the British Museum made close collaboration between curators and educators more difficult, with education the business of a separate department, whose teaching was gallery and classroom based. The teachers did make good use of the Museum of Mankind’s teaching (formerly handling) collection, which was moved twice to temporary vacant spaces in the British Museum. It now filled more than thirty stationery cupboards, expanding in promising new directions to involve other departments, with the accession of archaeological artefacts and props such as Paleolithic stone axes, a replica Roman legionary’s helmet, and Persian imperial regalia created for the film of Alexander the Great. For several years we improved the catalogue and storage of the teaching collection with the help of students from the Anthropology Department of University College London, who gained curatorial experience under my instruction. But the British Museum had no dedicated Activity Room and, with the retirement of the Ethnography assistant keepers who had done most to provide educational resources for their exhibitions and a new Head of Education succeeding John Reeve, there was no support at the departmental level for obtaining one. Eventually the teaching collection was moved once again, this time to an offsite store, where I gave up on it. My own job was changing too and I was happy to move into more academic work as collaboration developed with higher education institutions. John Reeve initiated a World Art diploma course with Birkbeck College, using the British Museum’s new seminar rooms and galleries. From 2003 to 2010 I worked with the course organiser Fiona Candlin to teach a ‘core course’ as a foundation for more specialised modules on regional and local art traditions, from African and Asian art to Arabic calligraphy and Indian film. This was my opportunity to pull together some opinions and half formed theories about art, developing my experience in the Museum of Mankind to complement Fiona’s

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knowledge of art history. The British Museum galleries provided historical illustrations for the emergence of Western ideas of art, which had come to inform the art world treatment of certain collectible artefacts as commodities defined as ‘art objects’. The course was eventually killed off by government cuts to higher education funding, but it formed the basis for a textbook in which I proposed an alternative anthropological approach to ‘world art’, summarised in its subtitle ‘the art in artefacts’ (Burt 2013). My conclusion was that art could be better understood as the creation and apprehension of formal pattern as an aspect of all kinds of human activity, rather than as the categories of artefacts defined so ambiguously as art in Western culture. Thus I resolved my issues with the Museum of Mankind over art and ethnography. The event which really marked Ethnography’s return from the Museum of Mankind was the opening of the Wellcome Gallery, coinciding with the British Museum’s 250th anniversary celebrations in 2003. The Department had been allocated the huge North Library, between the Great Court and the King Edward extension which formed the north facade of the British Museum, and John Mack secured a grant from the Wellcome Trust to fit it out as a gallery. Its size and position on the main thoroughfare from the front to the back of the building presented a special opportunity to promote our collections in the British Museum. A series of seminars at the Museum of Mankind discussed some possibilities without any useful conclusions. I suggested that as our department represented more of the world than all the others put together, we might try to present our collections within a view of world history and culture that included references to other departments, providing an introduction to the British Museum as a whole which placed Ethnography at its centre. Such proposals foundered on the fact that Wellcome had its own agenda for the gallery, although we never learned exactly what this was beyond the Trust’s promotion of medical science. Recognising that this Western category was inapplicable to most of the cultures we were dealing with (besides being marginal to the purpose of the gallery), it was eventually decided that the concept of ‘wellbeing’ might be a plausible compromise, accommodating religious cosmologies as well as scientific ones within an anthropological approach.

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So began a series of discussions to decide how this could be represented in the gallery, which tied the senior curators in knots until eventually the project was passed on to be rescued by Lissant Bolton. Lissant, from Australia, had been appointed Assistant Keeper for Oceania in 1999 after Michael O’Hanlon had left to become Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum and Dorota Starzecka had retired. She sensibly proposed that, rather than attempt a grand statement on world wellbeing, we might present a series of culture-specific case studies. Eventually, four island cases on major human concerns exemplified by particular societies stood between two walls of cases divided into smaller case studies on the themes of Life’s Ordinary Dangers, what people saw as the hazards of life, and Your Life in Their Hands, how they dealt with these through diagnosis and treatment. A fashionable ‘artwork’, Cradle to Grave, in a very long low case down the middle of the gallery, made a point of including scientific cosmology and its focus on individual health issues, illustrated by a lifetime’s medication for a Western man and woman. As an interesting presentation more appropriate to a modern art gallery, it helped to justify the Wellcome Trust grant according to its charter as a medical charity. When the Wellcome Gallery opened in 2003 under the title Living and Dying, it provided a sample from our vast collections that allowed people to make some kind of sense of artefacts from particular cultures, even though few probably grasped the point of the gallery as a whole. As Lissant later explained (2008), it was a conceptual exhibition that, as she and the sponsors intended, sought to assert a global shared humanity. Rather than reducing this to Western values such as medical science as conceived by Wellcome or art as presented in the Sainsbury African Galleries, Living and Dying tried to reflect the complex diversity recognised by anthropology. In the event, the concept was compromised not only by the terms of the sponsorship but also by the prevailing art museum house style of the British Museum. The designer was once again Geoff Pickup, who commissioned the largest possible glass boxes, impractical both for installing the exhibits and for maintaining climatic control, and allowed minimal graphics to provide the cultural context sought by the various curators involved. The ill-conceived

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project did avoid being another art exhibition and actually won an award, but it came close to being an embarrassment to the Department. The next year, in 2004, the Ethnography offices and Library returned at last from the Museum of Mankind to the British Museum. The offices went into the East Residence, one of the wings originally built to house the staff that provided large rooms for the keepers on the first and second floors and cosy little ones for some of the others in the servants’ quarters on the third floor with views of the inside of the parapet. This was where I ended up, high above the Conservation Workshop in the basement where I had begun working for the British Museum all those years ago. The Ethnography Library went to the former British Library State Papers Room, five minutes’ walk away at the north of the building, where it was grandly named the Centre for Anthropology. This appeared to promise new research and educational facilities and might have earned its name if it had been developed to host some of the education resources provided at the Museum of Mankind. There were audio visual facilities which could have showed our film collection on demand, and the teaching collection could have been used by students of anthropology and other subjects. As it was, both films and artefacts disappeared into inaccessible storage and the Centre for Anthropology became only a smarter version of the combined Museum of Mankind Students’ Room and Reading Room. The return of the staff to the British Museum was marked by another shock, when the Director Neil MacGregor announced in our staff meeting the same week that the Ethnography Department was going to be reorganised as ‘Africa, Oceania and the Americas’. The Asian and European collections were going to the Oriental Antiquities Department, renamed Asia; to the Ancient Near East, renamed Middle East; and to British and Medieval, renamed Britain, Europe and Prehistory. This ended the longstanding art historical separation of the prestigious Oriental antiquities of the elites from the culture of the peasants who supported them as their lords and masters within the same cultural traditions and it united the recent kingdoms and independent communities of southeast Asia with their antiquities and with the major civilisations of the region. But

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although it was sensible and necessary in theory, the reform caused distress to many of the staff, particularly after the disruption of the move and the aborted Study Centre project. The problem was that, like the reincorporation of Ethnography into the British Museum, it handed the collections to a conservative establishment that did not recognise their value. Asia was a department of art historians and the one anthropologist employed as a middle-ranking curator to look after its new acquisitions from Ethnography eventually left in frustration at the new department’s lack of interest in cultures which did not produce Oriental art. That was the end of the British Museum Department of Ethnography. It had endured for fifty-eight years, of which I had witnessed thirty-five. That same year, John Mack left for a Sainsbury professorship in art history at the University of East Anglia and was succeeded as Keeper by Jonathan King. The morale of the new department continued to decline, including my own when Jonathan tried to make me redundant in 2008. As it turned out, I went part-time at the age of sixty and his own career ended a few years later following a new infestation of moths, a consequence of earlier relaxation in the pest control regime at Orsman Road. After a period under central administration, Lissant Bolton was appointed Keeper and in time the AOA Department began to realise its potential as an integral and valued part of the British Museum. Even so, as long-term members of the Department complained, it was hard to recover the corporate spirit and collective identity of the Museum of Mankind. The size and bureaucratic complexity of the British Museum made it impossible to recreate the close organisational and personal relationships between the curators, educators, conservators, librarians, administrators, technicians, warders and security officers who used to work so closely together as colleagues and friends in a small museum but were now mostly separated into distinct departments. The sense of fun disappeared too, maybe because those who remained were now twenty or thirty years older but also perhaps because everyone now felt under more pressure to fulfil the managerial demands of the twenty-first century ‘cultural sector’.

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Africa, Oceania and the Americas still has dedicated and enthusiastic colleagues, old and new, who are friendly, sociable and amusing, and the younger generation even organise innovative and lively Christmas parties. The Department has also led some progressive and humane developments in curation and research. In the mid-2000s, major funding was secured for a programme, managed by Julie Hudson, to rejuvenate museums in several African countries and to bring their curators to the British Museum for training. Despite the move towards art historical exhibitions, curatorial work was also providing new opportunities for anthropology. Formerly ‘material culture’ as studied in museums seldom seemed to offer very much intellectually, with its focus on typologies, technologies and art. But from the 1990s, after working in education, researching in Solomon Islands and working with new colleagues, I found a fresh purpose for curatorial work. Museum collections were becoming resources for cultural reconstitution and revitalisation, realising my own wish to record and repatriate cultural knowledge to source communities like the Kwara’ae of Solomon Islands. An Oceania section Melanesia Project in the late 2000s brought experts from such communities, including my ‘brother’ Michael Kwa’ioloa and other friends from Solomon Islands, to study and publish the British Museum collections (see Bolton, Thomas et al. 2013). This was something I could contribute to as I drifted towards retirement as a part-time curator. In 2016 Lissant Bolton, who only joined the Museum of Mankind in 1999 after it had closed to the public, gave official recognition to its legacy by holding a conference at the British Museum. There were presentations by John Picton and Shelagh Weir, who were there when the Museum of Mankind began, by successive Keepers Malcolm McLeod, John Mack and Jonathan King, by their deputies Brian Durrans and Nigel Barley, by Helen Wolfe who had worked on almost all the Museum of Mankind’s exhibitions, and Penny Bateman who had organised its most successful education programmes. As the longest serving member of the Department, I chaired the opening event, an informal evening of drinks with reminiscences from a few of the old hands. I recalled Albert Davis and the jokes we played

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on him, Mick Goddard mentioned Tony Wiltshire throwing the telephone out of the window, his own sculptures and health and safety in his workshop, and John Osborn described managing the Stores. Relative latecomers Jim Hamill spoke about strange public visitors leaving unwanted possessions in the Students’ Room, and Mike Cobb explained the cartoons he had drawn of his colleagues, included in a slide show of photos from the last fifty years or so. Others in the audience contributed their own amusing anecdotes to a good natured reunion. When we went to the pub afterwards, colleagues then unborn wished that work in the British Museum could be as humane and enjoyable as the Museum of Mankind that we recalled.

EPILOGUE As I conclude this memoir of a thirty-year museum exper-

iment that ended twenty years ago, I feel both disappointed and optimistic for the old British Museum Ethnography Department. The mismanaged reintegration into the British Museum discouraged us all and the achievements of the Museum of Mankind were barely acknowledged, recalled by fewer and fewer as the staff retired. But the British Museum, ever a bit behind the times, is now engaging with the kind of issues I was raising at the Museum of Mankind, following other ethnography (or ‘world cultures’) museums. Under slogans such as ‘decolonising museums’, the history of collecting from and representing colonised societies is being examined critically, often in partnership with them. At the British Museum, temporary exhibitions, if not yet permanent galleries, have presented enduring cultural traditions in the context of their colonial histories rather than in ahistorical artistic and ethnographic presents. At the same time, the collections have become increasingly available to their source communities through the online database as well as collaborative research projects, while curatorial skills are being shared with them through professional training. Senior curators of what is now Africa, Oceania and the Americas are at the forefront of initiatives enabling source communities and their British diasporas to recover their heritage and reconstitute their culture using museum resources and collections. Curators now accept that collecting other people’s artefacts and representing their culture and history is something that should be discussed with them, even as they struggle with relinquishing curatorial control to source communities who may have more moral claim but less experience and capacity. Even the art–ethnography tensions are being mediated

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by the inclusion of indigenous artists who reflect on the colonial history of their own communities. Amidst all the populist efforts to increase visitor numbers, the corporate sponsorship that compensates for stingy public funding, and arty exhibitions appealing to Western art world fashions, Africa, Oceania and the Americas is helping the British Museum to realise its potential as a resource for the reconstitution of the diverse cultures it represents. Rather than simply collecting and classifying artefacts for academic research and exhibiting them for the entertainment of passive audiences, the British Museum is also engaging creatively with the history and culture of other societies and its own relationships with them.

A PPENDIX

ETHNOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT EXHIBITIONS, 1970 TO 2003

Venues were by room numbers and other spaces were in the Museum of Mankind (with new numbers from 1975 in brackets). Other sites were in the British Museum (BM), including the BP Ethnography Showcase (BM, BP). Sir Hans Sloane and Ethnography

Room 1 (Shop)

December 1970 to August 1972

Costumes of Palestine

Room 5 (2)

December 1970 to May 1973

Spinning and Weaving in Palestine

Room 3 (4)

December 1970 to May 1973

Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico

Room 6 (1)

December 1970 to January 1973

The Tribal Image: Wooden Room 7 (6) Figure Sculpture of the World

December 1970 to August 1971

The Raffles Gamelan: A Javanese Orchestra

Room 8 (7)

December 1970 to August 1971

Javanese Shadow Puppets

Room 9 (7b)

December 1970 to August 1971

The Potter’s Art in Africa

Room 13 (9)

December 1970 to November 1976

Divine Kingship in Africa

Room 14 (8)

December 1970 to October 1973

Hunters and Gatherers: The Material Culture of the Nomadic Hadza of Tanzania

Room 15 (7a)

December 1970 to January 1974

Pre-Columbian Art from El Salvador (loan)

Room 12

March 1971 to June 1971

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Maya Pottery and Sculpture from Mexico (loan)

Room 10 (11)

July 1971 to October 1971

Village Arts of Romania (loan)

Room 7-9 (6-7-7b) November 1971 to July 1972

The Aborigines of Australia

Room 10

June 1972 to February 1982

Manding: Focus on an African Civilisation

Room 12

June 1972 to August 1972

Eskimo Art in the British Museum

Room 1 (Shop)

October 1972 to September 1977

Eskimo Sculpture: Masterworks Room 4-5 (3-2) of the Canadian Arctic (loan)

October 1972 to December 1972

The Tribal Image: Wooden Room 7 (6) Figure Sculpture of the World

October 1972 to January 1975

The Raffles Gamelan: A Javanese Orchestra

Room 8 (7)

October 1972 to June 1973

Malay Shadow Puppets: The Wayang Siam of Kelantan

Room 9 (7b)

October 1972 to May 1973

The Gonds of Central India

Room -3 (5-4)

August 1973 to October 1975

The Maya

Room 5 (2)

September 1973 to September 1975

The British and the Maya

Room 4 (3)

September 1973 to September 1975

From the Five Continents

Room 8 (7)

September 1973 to September 1975

Yoruba Religious Cults

Room 14 (8)

May 1974 to August 1981

The Solomon Islanders

Room 11

May 1974 to June 1985

The Tribal Eye

Room 7 (6)

May 1975 to June 1978

Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico

Room 6 (1)

May 1975 to August 1983

Hawaii

Room 12

December 1975 to December 1997

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Treasures from the Ethnographic Collections

Room 8 (7)

December 1975 to December 1997

Nomad and City: The Bedouin; City of Sana’a; City of Offea

Room 2-5

April 1976 to September 1978

Indian Art of the Northwest Coast: The lnverarity Collection

Room 7a

August 1976 to November 1978

Masks from Mexico

Front Hall

December 1976 to January 1977

The Otavalo of Ecuador: Photographs by Senna Kolinsky

Front Hall

February 1977 to May 1978

Bulgarian Village Arts

Room 9

March 1977 to August 1979

Smoking Pipes of the North American Indian

Room 7b

December 1977 to December 1978

Sir Eric Thompson (1898–1975)

Students’ Room corridor

1978

Headdresses from Romania (loan)

Front Hall

March 1978 to June 1978

The Art of the Brazilian Indians Room 6 (loan)

August 1978 to October 1978

Ashanti Goldweights

Room 7b

November 1978 to October 1979

Moche Pottery from Peru

Room 7a

January 1979 to October 1982

Art of Ghana: The Barclay Armitage Collection

Room 6

February 1979 to October 1979

Captain Cook and the South Seas

Room 2-5

February 1979 to September 1980

Aspects of Siberian Design

Landing

September 1979 to April 1980

African Textiles

Room 7-9

December 1979 to May 1983

Art Made for Strangers: Haida Argillite Carving from British Columbia

Room 7b

February 1980 to August 1983

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Facsimile American Codices

Students’ Room corridor

April 1980 to October 1982

Tangata, The Maori Vision of Man: Photographs by Brain Blake

Front Hall

June 1980 to August 1980

The Epstein Collection

Front Hall

October 1980 to February 1981

Asian Blades

Landing

November 1980 to June 1981

The Cusichaca Archaeological Project (photos)

Front Hall

December 1980 to February 1981

Asante: Kingdom of Gold

Room 2-5

February 1981 to March 1984

North American Indians

—

April 1981 to May 1981

The Versatile Calabash

Front Hall

May 1981 to February 1982

North West Coast: Recent Acquisitions from the Wellcome Collection

—

June 1981 to February 1982

Bulgarian Village Arts

Front Hall

September 1981 to February 1982

Sudanese Photographs: Peoples of Southern Sudan

Front Hall

July 1981 to September 1981

Mexican Indian Ethnography

Front Hall

October 1981 to February 1982

Images of Mexico: Photographs by Marcos Ortiz

Front Hall

October 1981 to February 1982

Turkish Folk Embroideries (loan) Front Hall

November 1981 to December 1982

Australian Aboriginal Paintings: Australian Art of the Western Desert

Front Hall

March 1982 to May 1982

The Azande of Central Africa

Landing

March 1982 to May 1982

Vasna: Inside an Indian Village

Room 8

April 1982 to January 1984

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Tahumara of Mexico: Front Hall Photographs by Trisha Vargas

May 1982

Thunderbird and Lightning: Room 10 Indian Life in North America 1600 to 1900

June 1982 to January 1987

The Other America: Native Front Hall Artifacts from the New World

September 1982

Codex Facsimiles from Mexico and the Maya Area

Students’ Room corridor

September 1982 to December 1984

Benin Plaques

BM

September 1982

Afro-Portuguese Ivories

Room 7a

October 1982 to April 1983

Photographs by Delwyn Jones

Front Hall

December 1982

Our Kinsman: Portraits of the Campa-Ashaninka People of the Peruvian Rainforest

Landing

January 1983 to February 1983

African Pipes and Paraphernalia

Room 6

January 1983 to September 1983

Tears of the Moon: SpanishAmerican Colonial Silver

Room 7a

June 1983 to February 1984

Bemba Raiders of the Central African Plateau

Room 9

July 1983 to January 1986

In the Buddhist Himalayas: Photographs by Richard Ravensdale

Room 7b

September 1983

Beyond the Great Wall: Photographs by Robert Forrester

Room 7b

October 1983

Himalayan Rainbow: A Nepalese Textile Tradition

Room 7b

December 1983 to January 1985

Pattern of Islands: Micronesia Yesterday and Today

Room 6, Landing December 1983 to June 1986

Argonauts of the Western Pacific Room 7a The Palau Islands of Micronesia: Photographs by Harvey W. Reed

Room 1

March 1984 to November 1984 July 1984 to October 1984

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Inuit Eskimo: People of the North American Arctic

Room 7a

December 1984 to June 1986

The Hidden Peoples of the Amazon

Room 2-3

March 1985 to July 1987

Native American Arts: The Living Tradition

Room 8

May 1985 to June 1985

Aztec Treasures from Mexico (loan)

Room 7

June 1985 to November 1985

A Tour of Finland: Folk Costume Room 7 from Finnish Karelia (loan) Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons

Room 11

October 1985 to January 1986 November 1985 to October 1987

Work by Students, Royal College Front Hall of Art

1985

Recent Acquisitions

Front Hall

1985

African Sculpture: Major Woodcarvings from the Museum’s Collection

Room 8

February 1986 to August 1986

African Seats of Authority

Room 12

May 1986 to January 1987

Kalabari Ljos: Faces of the Dead Room 7a

July 1986 to August 1988

Landing

August 1986 to April 1987

Pottery from Casas Grandes, Mexico

Madagascar: Island of Ancestors Room 6

September 1986 to October 1988

Mexican Nativity Scenes

Room 8-9

December 1986 to January 1987

Bolivian Worlds: The Art and World View of an Andean Mining Community

Room 6

March 1987 to May 1988

The Arab World (activity room)

Room 7

April 1987 to August 1987

Toraja: Creating an Indonesian Rice Barn

Room 10-12

June 1987 to April 1991

Introduction to the Collections

Room 5

July 1987 to July 1995

149

APPENDIX

Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico

Room 1

August 1987 to July 1994

Living Arctic: Hunters of the Canadian North

Room 2-3 to 4

December 1987 to July 1990

Dreams and the Land: Contemporary Aboriginal Paintings

Room 6

July 1988 to May 1989

Traffic Art: Rickshaw Paintings from Bangladesh

Room 10-11

September 1988 to April 1991

Miniature Sculpture from Papua Room 7a New Guinea: Carved Utensils Used in Betel Chewing

December 1988 to May 1989

A Victorian Earl in the Arctic

Room 6

July 1989 to July 1991

Palestinian Costume

Room 8-9

November 1989 to December 1991

Images of Africa: Emile Torday and the Art of the Congo 1900–1909

Room 2-3

November 1990 to September 1993

Man and Metal in Ancient Nigeria

BM

May 1991 to September 1991

The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico

Room 10-11-12

November 1991 to November 1993

Mexican Painted Books: Before and after the Spanish Conquest

–

June 1992 to September 1992

Treasures of the Americas

Room 7a-7-7b

February 1993 to August 1995

The British Museum Society: The First Twenty-Five Years

Landing

June 1993 to October 1993

Paradise: Change and Continuity in the New Guinea Highlands

Room 8

July 1993 to July 1995

Navajo Textiles

Room 4

November 1993 to March 1994

The Kingdom of Shamba: The Kuba of Zaire

Room 3

November 1993 to November 1994

150

APPENDIX

Great Benin: A West African Kingdom

Room 2

December 1993 to December 1997

Yemeni Pottery

Room 6

March 1994 to June 1994

The Pomaks of Bulgaria

Students’ March 1994 to Room corridor October 1994

Merina Textiles from Madagascar

Room 4

March 1994 to October 1994

Maldives: Surviving on a Reef

Room 6

June 1994 to January 1995

Inuit Prints from the Ethnography Collection

Students’ September 1994 to Room corridor November 1994

Katherine Scoresby Routledge and the Mana Expedition to Easter Island

Students’ October 1994 to Room corridor September 1995

Smashing Pots: Feats of Clay from Africa

Room 10-11

Balkan Costume from the Waller Room 4 Collection

October 1994 to April 1997 November 1994 to April 1995

Mexican Gallery

BM

November 1994

Wooden Sculpture from Easter Island

–

November 1994 to August 1994

The Ainu of Japan

Room 6

February 1995 to March 1996

Social Fabrics: Recent Textile Acquisitions from Indonesia

Room 4

April 1995 to September 1995

Play and Display: Masquerades of Southern Nigeria

Room 8

September 1995 to July 1996

Made in Africa: Africa and the Room 7-7a National Art Collection Fund

September 1995 to January 1996

Display and Modesty: North African Textiles

Room 5

January 1995 to February 1997

Secular and Sacred: Ethiopian Textiles

Room 4

October 1995 to August 1996

Posters and Books from the Museum of Mankind

Students’ November 1995 Room corridor

151

APPENDIX

Textiles of Highland Burma from BM the Ethnography Collections

November 1995 to April 1996

The Power of the Hand: African Arms and Armour

Room 3

November 1995 to July 1996

Twenty-Five Years of the Museum of Mankind

–

September 1995 to April 1996

Pottery of Magdalene Odundo

–

1995

Stairways to the Sky: Rice and Life in the Philippines

Room 6

April 1996 to December 1997

The Gilded Image: Pre-Columbian Gold from South and Central America

Room 1

May 1996 to December 1997

Inuit People in Photographs

Students’ June 1996 Room corridor

Rain: Native Peoples of the Desert Southwest

Room 3

September 1996 to April 1997

Imaging the Arctic

Room 14

September 1996 to June 1997

African Hairdressers’ Signs

Front Hall

January 1997 to May 1997

Mexican Textiles

BM, BP

January 1997 to May 1997

Striking Tents: Central Asian Room 5 Nomad Felts from Kyrgyzstan

March 1997 to December 1997

Drawings from Kyrgyzstan

Students’ Room corridor

March 1997 to April 1997

Striking Tents: Central Asian Nomad Felts

BM, BP

May 1997 to October 1997

Malaita: A Pacific Island at the Museum of Mankind

Students’ Room corridor

April 1997 to December 1997

Pottery in the Making: World Ceramic Traditions

Room 10-11

July 1997 to December 1997

Count and Capture: Mancala Game-Boards

Room 3

July 1997 to December 1997

Patagonia: The Uttermost End of the Earth

Room 4

September 1997 to December 1997

South African Beadwork

BM, BP

October 1997 to February 1998

152

APPENDIX

The Return of the Museum of Mankind

BM, BP

March 1998 to June 1998

Miao Costumes from South West China

BM, BP

July 1998 to October 1998

Maori

BM

July 1998 to November 1998

Artists and Artisans: Perspectives on Tunisian Culture

BM, BP

October 1998 to February 1999

The Golden Sword: Sir Stanford BM Raffles and the East

December 1998 to April 1999

Conservation of the Ethnography Collections

BM, BP

March 1999 to August 1999

Life and Ceremony in Urban Algeria

BM, BP

September 1999 to January 2000

The North American Gallery

BM

1999

The Sainsbury African Gallery

BM

2000

Voices of southern Africa

BM, BP

November 2000 to January 2001

Annuraaq: Arctic Skin Clothing from Lglooik

BM, BP

February 2001 to May 2001

Souvenirs in Contemporary Japan

BM, BP

June 2001 to January 2002

Unknown Amazon: Culture and BM Nature in Ancient Brazil

October 2001 to April 2002

Light Motifs: An Aomori Float and Japanese Kites

BM

October 2001 to April 2002

Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures

BM

November 2001 to March 2002

Nomadic Textiles from Afghanistan: Lakai Uzbek Embroidery

BM

September 2002 to January 2003

Living and Dying: The Wellcome BM Gallery

2003

REFERENCES

Aguirre, R.D. 2005. Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ames, M. 1986. Museums, the Public and Anthropology: A Study in the Anthropology of Anthropology. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Belk, R.W. 1995. Collecting in a Consumer Society. London: Routledge. Bolton, L. 2008. ‘Living and Dying: Ethnography, Class, and Aesthetics in the British Museum’, in D.J. Sherman (ed.), Museums and Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bolton, L., N. Thomas et al. (eds). 2013. Melanesia: Art and Encounter. London: British Museum Press. Bourne, R. 1985. ‘Are Amazonian Indians Museum Pieces?’ New Society, 29 November. Braunholtz, H. 1970. Sir Hans Sloane and Ethnography. London: British Museum. British Museum. 1910. Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections. London: British Museum. Brody, H. 1987. Living Arctic: Hunters of the Canadian North. London: Faber & Faber. Burt, B. 1977a. Aborigines. London: British Museum Publications. ———. 1977b. The Yoruba and their Gods. London: British Museum Publications. ———. 2005. Africa in the World, Past and Present: A Museum History. London: British Museum Press ———. 2009. Body Ornaments of Malaita, Solomon Islands. London: British Museum Press; Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 2013. World Art: An Introduction to the Art in Artefacts. London: Bloomsbury. Burt, B. and M. Kwa’ioloa. 1992. Falafala ana Ano ‘i Kwara’ae / The Tradition of Land in Kwara’ae. Honiara: Institute of Pacific Studies and Honiara Centre, University of the South Pacific. ——— (eds). 2001. A Solomon Islands Chronicle, as Told by Samuel Alasa’a. London: British Museum Press. Carmichael, E. and C. Sayer. 1991. The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico. London: British Museum Publications.

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Cranstone, B. 1966. New Guinea: The Sepik Head-waters, 1963-4. London: British Museum. Durrans, B. and R. Knox. 1982. India: Past into Present. London: British Museum Publications. Errington, S. 1998. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Fagg, W. 1965. Tribes and Forms in African Art. New York: Tudor. (Introduction reprinted in H. Morphy and M. Perkins [eds.]. 2006. The Anthropology of Art: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.) ———. 1970. The Tribal Image: Wooden Figure Sculpture of the World. London: British Museum. Gallagher, R., D. Jones and R. Warner. 1989. Rickshaws: Art and Industry. London: The Basement Project. Jones, J. 2009. The Guardian, 22 May. Kirkman, J. (ed.). 1975. City of Sanaa: Nomad and City Exhibition. London: Festival of Islam Publishing Company. Kwa’ioloa, M. and B. Burt. 1997. Living Tradition: A Changing Life in Solomon Islands. London: British Museum Press; Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 2001. Na Masu’u kia ’i Kwara’ae: Tualaka ’i Solomon Islands fa’inia logo na Ru¯ ne’e Bulao saena Fanoa kia kı¯: Our Forest of Kwara’ae: Our Life in Solomon Islands and the Things Which Grow in our Home. London: British Museum Press. ———. 2012. The Chiefs’ Country: Leadership and Politics in Honiara, Solomon Islands. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Mack, J. 1986. Madagascar: Island of the Ancestors. London: British Museum Publications. ———. (ed.). 2000. Africa: Arts and Cultures. London: British Museum Press. McEwan, C., M. Silva and C. Hudson. 2006. ‘Using the Past to Forge the Future: The Genesis of the Community Site Museum at Agua Blanca, Ecuador’, in H. Silverman (ed.), Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. McLeod, M. 1981. The Asante. London: British Museum Publications. ———. 1985. ‘Paolozzi and Identity’, in M. McLeod and E. Paolozzi (eds), Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons from Nahuatl. London: British Museum Publications, pp. 15–60. ———. 1993. ‘Collecting for the British Museum’, Quaderni Poro 8. Midwinter, C. 1994. Benin: An African Kingdom. UK: WWF. O’Hanlon, M. 1993. Paradise: Portraying the New Guinea Highlands. London: British Museum Press. Phelps, S. 1976. Art and Artefacts of the Pacific, Africa and the Americas: The James Hooper Collection. London: Hutchinson. Price, S. 1989. Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Sayer, C. 1990. Mexican Textiles. London: British Museum Publications. Scott-Kemball, J. 1970. Javanese Shadow Puppets. London: British Museum. Shelton, A. 2003. ‘Curating African Worlds’, in L. Peers and L. Brown (eds), Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Sillitoe, P. 1988. Made in Niugini: Technology in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. London and Durham: British Museum Publications and University of Durham. Spring, C. 2015. A Way of Life: Considering and Curating the Sainsbury African Galleries. PhD thesis, Middlesex University. Starzecka, D., R. Neich and M. Pendergrast. 2010. Taonga Ma¯ori in the British Museum. London: British Museum Press. Weir, S. 1973. The Gonds of Central India. London: British Museum. ———. 1985. The Bedouin. London: Festival of Islam Publishing Company. Wilson, D. 1989. The British Museum: Purpose and politics. London: British Museum Publications. Woodburn, J. 1970. Hunters and Gatherers: The Material Culture of the Nomadic Hadza. London: British Museum.

INDEX

academic disciplines, issues and practices anthropologists, 8, 22, 36, 39, 49, 56, 68, 89, 105, 114, 115 anthropology 5, 16, 17, 24, 26, 48, 57, 63, 82, 85–92, 95, 102, 105, 114, 115, 125, 130, 134, 135–136, 137, 138, 139 anthropology of art, 82–3, 68, 82–3, 134–135 archaeology, 7–8, 11, 46, 65, 69, 82, 84, 87, 89, 122–123, 126, 134 art–ethnography issues, 2, 19, 20, 48, 59, 88, 95, 101, 111, 119, 130–131, 138, 141 art exhibitions and museums, 21, 36, 46, 59, 60, 61, 62, 82–3, 95, 105, 111–2, 118, 129–130, 131, 136–137, 138, 142 art history and Western art world values, 3, 12, 20, 32, 39, 48, 60, 87, 95, 96, 118, 125, 130 authenticity, 2, 83, 95–97, 118 contemporary and gallery art, 20, 48, 60–63, 96, 118, 129–130, 131, 136 ethnography; definitions, meanings and perspectives, 1, 2, 5–7, 18– 20, 44, 46, 48, 50, 54, 62, 63, 82, 84, 88–89, 94, 95, 98, 118–119, 126, 129, 130–131, 141 Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections, 6, 84, 111 primitivism and primitive / tribal art, 19–20, 21, 60, 83, 94, 95–97, 101, 118, 129–130 publications, 20, 50, 53, 61, 87, 89–90, 93, 105, 126, 130, 135. See also education and public services: educational publications, notes, worksheets research, collections and archives, 2, 3, 15, 24, 35, 69–70, 72, 73, 76, 82–83, 85, 87, 127, 139, 141 research, fieldwork, 20, 47, 49, 52, 56, 68, 69, 85–95, 97, 103, 105, 107, 113, 114–115, 126 Students’ Rooms, 35–36, 68, 70, 76, 80, 83–85, 104, 137, 140 British Museum antiquities departments, 4, 5, 6, 17–18, 55, 84, 100, 134, 137–8 Bloomsbury site, 5–6, 10–15, 17–19, 22–23, 27–28, 41, Chapter 7 British Library, 6, 17, 97, 121, 125, 135, 137 Great Court, 125, 128, 132–133 Study Centre project, 127–128, 138

INDEX

157

collections and libraries collecting, 1, 18, 49, 56, 62, 76, 88–89, 93–94, 98, 113, 115, 124, 141 conservation, 8–10, 12, 13, 15, 19, 22, 25, 34, 44, 68, 78, 88, 128 digital technology and databases, 3, 38, 70–72, 141 registration and cataloguing, 47, 68–72, 76, 127–128 library, 2, 15, 24, 36, 37, 44, 69, 97–99, 127, 137. See also British Museum: British Library looted objects, 21, 52, 53, 60, 88, 116, 132 pests and pest control, 79–80, 15, 23, 66, 138 pictorial and photograph collection, 97–99 storage, 7, 13–14, 22–24, Chapter 4, 95, 98, 126–128 textile collection, 127–128 colonialism colonial issues and attitudes, 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 18, 20, 48, 51, 53–56, 60–61, 63, 65, 85, 91–92, 94 96, 108, 111, 112, 119, 114–115, 119, 122, 124–5, 131–132, 141–142 ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism, 17, 121 loot. See under collections and libraries racism, 8, 14–15, 51–53, 66, 111–112 Orientalism, 49, 121 Western cultural hegemony, 3, 131 education and public services Activity Rooms, 44, 104, 107, 108–109, 113–114, 115, 116, 119, 120, 134 educational publications, notes, worksheets, 54, 55, 58, 62, 100– 101, 102, 106, 112, 119, 131–132, 135 enquiries, 35–36, 83 film and video shows, 59, 72, 101, 102, 103, 137 handling and teaching collection, 69, 101, 104, 108, 112, 115, 119, 134, 137 lectures and study days, 101, 57–58, 126 public access, 2, 35, 98, 127 public service ethos, 1, 2, 3, 82, 102 public events and workshops, 65, 110, 112–113, 118, 119, 127, 132–133 school visits, 36, 100 Schools Room, 101, 118 World Art course, 134–135 education programmes Arab World, 104, 109 Benin and African Village, 116–118 Images of Africa, 111–112 Living Arctic, 105–107

158

INDEX

Palestinian Costume, 107–110 Paradise, 115–116 Skeleton at the Feast, 112–114 educational organisations and NGOs Heritage Ceramics, 116–118, 133 Indigenous Survival International, 105 Inner London Education Authority, 103 Learning Through Action, Mexicolore, 113–114 Oxfam, 103 Survival International, 56–58, 105, 126 WWF, 103, 116 exhibition practice and policy catalogues, 20, 21, 44, 89, 94, 102 design, 28, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 111, 126, 130, 136 display cases, 22, 27, 31, 33, 44–45, 46, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 111, 123, 125, 126, 129–130, 136 photographs, 18–19, 22, 44, 46, 49, 53–54, 56, 57, 62, 88, 97, 101, 108, 115 policy, 2, 3, 18, 44, 48, 113, 116 reconstructions, 2, 18, 20–21, 46, 47–48, 49–50, 52–54, 62, 65, 106, 113, 115, 117, 121 exhibitions and galleries Aborigines of Australia, 46 Ainu of Japan, 65 Art Made for Strangers, 62 Asante Kingdom of Gold, 51–54, 101 Ashanti Goldweights, 46 Australian Aboriginal Paintings, 62 Captain Cook and the South Seas, 51 Count and Capture, 119 Divine Kingship in Africa, 20–21 Ethiopian Textiles, 62 Ethnography galleries, British Museum, 18–19 Gonds of Central India, 46, 88 Great Benin, 116 Hawaii, 46 Hidden Peoples of the Amazon, 55–58, 104, 112 Hunters and Gatherers; The Hadza, 22, 88 Images of Africa, 111–112 Introduction to the Collections, 60 Living and Dying. See Wellcome Gallery

INDEX

Living Arctic, 65, 80, 94, 105–107, 125 Lost Magic Kingdoms, 61 Madagascar, 89 Maori, 95, 124 Maya, 46 Mexico Gallery, 122–123, 125 Moche Pottery, 46 Navajo Textiles, 62 Nomad and City, 49–51, 89, 100, 104 North America Gallery, 124–125 Palestinian Costume, 107–111, 114 Paradise, 65, 75, 94, 114–115 Patagonia, 65 Play and Display, 62, 118 Potter’s Art in Africa, 21 Pottery in the Making, 65 Pottery of Magdalene Odundo, 62 Power of the Hand, 62, 118 Rain, 63 Sainsbury African Gallery, 128–131, 133, 136 Skeleton at the Feast, 76, 112–114 Smashing Pots, 118 Smoking Pipes of the North American Indian, 46 Solomon Islanders, 45, 46 South African Beadwork, 124 Spinning and Weaving in Palestine, 22 Stairways to the Sky, 65 Toraja, 63–65 Traffic Art, 62 Treasures from the Ethnographic Collections, 46, 59–60 Tribal Eye, 39 Tribal Image, 20 Turquoise Mosaics from Mexico, 22 Unknown Amazon, 126 Vasna, 54–55, 89 Work by Students, 33, 61 Wellcome Gallery, 135–137 Yemeni Pottery, 65 Yoruba Religious Cults, 47–48, 54 exhibitions in other museums African Worlds, Horniman Museum, 131, 132 Magiciens de la Terre, 60 Primitivism in 20th Century Art, Museum of Modern Art, 60 Spririt Sings, Glenbow Museum, 106

159

160

INDEX

festivals and events Africa ’95, 62, 100, 118, 129, 131, 132 Black History Month, 132 Celebrating Africa, 132–133 Day of the Dead, 112–113 Eid, 110 Festival of India, 55 Music Village, 119 World of Islam, 49–50 museums and academic institutions Brighton Museum, 36 Bristol City Museum, 7–9 Commonwealth Institute, 36, 58, 59, 65 Institute of Archaeology, 34 Horniman Museum, 19, 131–132 Museum of London, 7 Museum of Modern Art, 60 Natural History Museum, 6 Pitt Rivers Museum, 36, 37, 46, 68, 136 Royal Academy, 51, 118, 119 Royal Anthropological Institute, 24 Royal College of Art, 61 Tropenmuseum, 65 University of British Columbia Museum, 36 University College London, 16, 26, 134 museum roles and relationships administrative and clerical, 15, 28, 37–38, 68 carpenters and technicians, 9, 10, 12, 14, 21, 24, 31, 32, 34, 41, 47, 66, 74–75, 77, 101, 106, 113, 117, 123 cleaners, 77, 80, 132 conservators, 5, 8–10, 12, 13, 14–15, 19, 22, 23, 25, 34, 44, 68, 77, 77, 88, 98, 128, 137 designers, 44, 47, 50, 51, 111, 130, 136 directors and deputy directors, 12, 52, 66, 84, 100, 110, 122, 132, 136, 137, 138 information, 36 jokes and pranks, 9, 10–11, 12, 14, 41–42, 25–26, Keeper of Ethnography, 11, 17, 26, 36, 38, 39, 51, 52, 76, 88, 89, 122–123, 138, 139 keepers, assistant, 11–12, 18, 19, 22, 23, 28–29, 30, 36–39, 40, 41, 44, 47, 48–49, 51, 57, 63, 68–73, 83–84, 88–89, 94–95 102, 104, 105, 111, 114, 116, 125, 134, 136, 139 labourers and masons’ assistants, 13, 24, 28–29, 30, 42–43, 66, 76, 77, 81

INDEX

library staff, 13, 37, 38, 40, 97–99 messengers, 14, 37–38 museum assistants, 10–14, 19, 24, 30, 39, 41, 51, 67, 68, 72, 74, 76–77, 86, 88, 124 museum assistants, senior, 10, 41, 77–79 parties, 26, 41–42, 74, 78, 79, 86, 119, 139 photographers, 13, 34, 68 research assistants, 26, 35–36, 39, 49, 70, 76, 83, 94, 100 security, 28, 30, 37, 38, 45, 60, 66, 84, 110 social class, 9, 12–13, 22, 26, 28, 32, 39–41, 84, 85, 87, 132 sponsors, 2, 50, 54, 105, 106–107, 110, 122–123, 124, 125, 127–130, 132, 135–136, 142 training, 14, 34, 36, 38, 52, 68, 76, 78, 97–98, 101–102, 105, 108, 139, 141 trustees, 26, 28, 39, 57, 58, 78, 89 warders, 11, 29–30, 38, 42, 66, 83, 84 museum staff and other colleagues Ames, Michael, 82–83 Attenborough David, 39, 78, 89, 120 Barley, Nigel, 38, 62, 63–65, 76, 83, 116, 129, 139 Bateman, Penny, 36, 103–104, 108, 110, 112, 139 Bolton, Lissant, 136, 138, 139 Bourne, Richard, 58–59 Brody, Hugh, 105 Candlin, Fiona, 134 Carmichael, Liz, 11, 22, 36, 41, 46, 56–57, 69, 74, 76, 84, 89, 90, 112, 113 Charles, Matthew, 76–77 Cobb, Mike, 74, 75, 140 Cranstone, Bryan, 11, 16, 18, 23, 26, 37, 46, 73, 88, 97 Davis, Albert, 10–11, 13, 14, 23, 25–26, 40–42, 76, 78, 139 Digby, Adrian, 11–12, 17, 26, 88 Douglas Camp, Sokari, 62, 118, 129 Downing, Michael, 72 Durrans, Brian, 38, 54, 62, 65, 89, 123, 139 Eckett, Bob, 67, 73, 76, 79–80 Gibbs, Peter, 86–87 Goddard, Mick, 11, 12, 13, 14, 23, 27, 29, 30–31, 33, 40–41, 42, 51, 52, 54, 56, 61, 73, 75–75, 107, 109, 113, 115, 119–120, 140 Govier, Tom, 10, 11, 12, 13, 34 Gowers, Harold, 10, 23, 14, 19, 26, 34 Guzie, Paul, 32–34, 40, 41, 42, 43, 77, 106, 119 Hamill, Jim, 36, 71, 76, 140 Hasel, Jill, 74–76

161

162

INDEX

Hooper, Stephen, 68 House Geoffrey, 58, 110 Hudson, Julie, 74, 76, 77, 129, 139 Hunter, Sid, 12, 24, 32, 40, 41, 42, 47, 52, 106 Kelani, Reem, 110 King, Jonathan, 37, 51, 105, 125, 138, 139 Kwa’ioloa, Michael, 92–93, 139 Langton, Les, 10, 11, 13, 14–15, 23 Lee, John, 10, 12, 13, 19, 34, 77, 89 Mack, John, 36, 38, 73, 75, 76, 89, 111, 122, 123, 129, 130, 135, 138, 139 McEwan, Colin, 65, 123, 126 McGregor, Neil, 132, 137 McLeod, Andy, 32, 34, 74, 76 McLeod, Malcolm, 26–27, 36, 42, 51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 61, 74–75, 89, 122, 139 Morphy, Howard, 68 Nimr, Sonia, 108–110 O’Hanlon, Michael, 36, 68, 75, 94, 114–115, 136 Ogogo, Tony, 116, 118, 133, Osborn, John, 13–14, 24, 41, 78–79, 80, 127, 128, 140 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 61–62 Persaud, Harry, 97–99 Pickup, Geoff, 111, 130, 136 Picton, John, 38, 47–48, 54, 139 Posey, Sarah, 36, 94 Reeve, John, 104, 131, 134 Sayer, Chloe, 89, 113 Scott-Kemball, Jeune, 87–88 Shelton, Tony, 36, 131 Spring, Chris, 25, 36, 42, 62, 72, 111, 130 Starzecka, Dorota, 37, 46, 51, 76, 79, 85, 89, 95, 124, 136 Webb, Maisie, 12, 84, 94 Weir, Shelagh, 11, 22, 36, 42, 49–50, 70, 89, 94, 104, 107–108, 110, 114, 139 Wiltshire, Tony, 29, 40, 42–43 Wolfe, Helen, 35, 36, 40, 42, 43, 51, 52, 56, 108, 112, 127, 128, 139 peoples and places Amazonian Indians, 13, 55–59, 126 Arabs, 22, 49–50, 65, 85, 89, 104, 107–111 Asante, 46, 51–54, 60, 101 Australian Aboriginals, 7, 62, 68, 96 Benin, 20–21, 53, 77, 83, 96, 116–117, 118, 128, 129–130 Congo, 111–112

INDEX

163

Kalabari, 62, 118, 129 Mexico, 22, 46, 76, 112–114, 122–123, 125 Native North Americans, 7–8, 15, 46, 62, 85–87, 65, 63, 80, 85–87, 94, 96, 105–107, 124–125 New Guinea, 8, 18–19, 46, 59, 65, 75, 88, 94, 114–115 Pacific Islands, 7, 8, 15, 46, 51, 68, 85, 89, 95, 96, 124, 139. See also New Guinea, Solomon Islands Solomon Islands, 8, 15, 24, 45–46, 88, 89, 90–94, 97, 98, 103, 139 South Asia, 46, 54–55, 62, 88 Southeast Asia, 59, 62, 87–88, 63–65 Yoruba, 47–48, 102, 118 source communities museum and research collaboration, 2, 3, 139, 52, 65, 73, 91–95, 98, 106, 116–118, 124, 139, 141 repatriation issues, 3, 51–53, 60 visiting demonstrators, performers and educators, 3, 63–65, 104, 106–107, 108–110, 113–114, 116–118, 124, 126, 132–133